[Paraview] How to find the nearest quad element?

[Dennis Conklin]

All,

I have an Exodus, multi-block model.  Most of the blocks are hex elements, and some are layers of quads (tires are composite structures).  I would like to establish local strains which are oriented in the direction of the nearest quad layer.  To do this I need to identify, for each hex in the model, which quad element in the model is closest to the hex.    Then I can extract directions from the quad element and rotate the strain tensor in the hex to these local coordinates.

My question is,  is there some clever and efficient way to quickly determine the nearest quad for each hex in the model.  Keep in mind that there are multiple blocks of quads, but if there is some way to address the quad blocks one at a time, I could make this work.

The brute force way is:
Loop over every hex in the model:
      Loop over every quad in the model:
             Calculate the distance between hex and quad
             Smallest distance wins!

That is a pretty brutally inefficient calc (several million hex elements) that I am trying to avoid - any ideas about how best to approach this.   I'm hoping for some elegant way to use connectivity or something of that sort.

Thanks for looking

Dennis
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