The power of the finite element method is its ability to accommodate non-standard structural shapes. But this requires us to mesh complex 2D geometries and the methods we’ve used to generate our mesh way back in section 4 are not going to cut it for long. 

We need a more robust way of generating the finite element mesh for our structures. We’ll discuss two tools to achieve this in this section and make some amendments to our export code to work with our new more complex meshes. 

We’re going to base this section around an arched-viaduct structure. This will give us enough complexity to stress test our code and highlight areas that require attention before we can apply our code to complex geometries.