[Adam_K]

Hello,

I am having an issue with gmsh crashing when I try to do many boolean operations. I want to generate a porous volume, where the medium is the empty space around overlapping spheres. My code, below, is meant to subtract the spheres from the starting box. It works fine for N up to 385, but if I used N = 386 or greater, gmsh crashes (on both of my computers).

Did I do something wrong? Or is this a limitation with gmsh/OpenCASCADE? At this point, I'm not even meshing, just defining the surfaces so I don't think it's a memory issue.

SetFactory("OpenCASCADE");

// x,y,z positions for the spheres (not shown for brevity)

N = 500;        // number of spheres
R = 0.1;      // cylinder radius
X = 1;        // size of domain in x-direction
Y = 1;        // size of domain in y-direction
Z = 10;        // size of domain in z-direction

LC = R;    // mesh critical length

// define entire domain
Box(1) = {0,0,0,X,Y,Z}; 

// define empty list for volume index numbers
VolIndex[] = {};

// for loop that places N spheres
For t In {1:N}
  NV = newv;    //new volume index
  Sphere(NV) = {x[t-1], y[t-1], z[t-1], R}; // Defines the Sphere
  VolIndex[] += NV; //adds this volume index to the list
EndFor

// Boolean subtraction of the total domain, minus the spheres
// both the original domain, and the original spheres are deleted

BooleanDifference{ Volume{1}; Delete; }{ Volume{VolIndex[]}; Delete; }