A new meccano technique for adaptive 3-D triangulations

Abstract

This paper introduces a new automatic strategy for adaptive tetrahedral mesh generation. A local refinement/derefinement algorithm for nested triangulations and a simultaneous untangling and smoothing procedure are the main involved techniques. The mesh generator is applied to 3-D complex domains whose boundaries are projectable on external faces of a coarse object meccano composed of cuboid pieces. The domain surfaces must be given by a mapping between meccano surfaces and object boundary. This mapping can be defined by analytical or discrete functions. At present we have fixed mappings with orthogonal, cylindrical and radial projections, but any other one-to-one projection may be considered. The mesh generator starts from a coarse tetrahedral mesh which is automatically obtained by the subdivision of each hexahedra, of a meccano hexahedral mesh, into six tetrahedra. The main idea is to construct a sequence of nested meshes by refining only those tetrahedra which have a face on the meccano boundary. The virtual projection of meccano external faces defines a valid triangulation on the domain boundary. Then a 3-D local refinement/derefinement is carried out such that the approximation of domain surfaces verifies a given precision. Once this objective is reached, those nodes placed on the meccano boundary are really projected on their corresponding true boundary, and inner nodes are relocated using a suitable mapping. As the mesh topology is kept during node movement, poor quality or even inverted elements could appear in the resulting mesh. For this reason, we finally apply a mesh optimization procedure. The efficiency of the proposed technique is shown with several applications to complex objects.