A Three-Dimensional Unstructured Mesh Generator for Arbitrary Internal Boundaries

Numerical Grid Generation in Computational Fluid Mechanics `88, Pineridge Press, pp.621-631, 1988

MESHING
RESEARCH
CORNER

in proceedings:
Numerical Grid Generation in Computational Fluid Mechanics '88, Edited by S. Sengupta, J. Hauser, P.R. Eiseman, J. F. Thompson.
Copyright 1988 Pineridge Press
ISBN 0-906674-68-9

AT&T Bell Laboratories, P.O.Box 900, Princeton, NJ, 08540.

Abstract
The ability to generate meshes, simply and efficiently, is critical to achieving the full benefits of the finite element method as applied to arbitrary and complex geometry. This is especially true in three-dimensions where manual or even semi-automatic generation techniques are too tedious and prone to error. Presented here, is a description of an algorithm for the automatic generation of 3-D meshes for arbitrary internal boundaries. The resulting meshes are unstructured and consist of linear tetrahedral elements. Development of this technique has been inspired by the Modified Octree Method.~ The implementation has proven to be quite successful at handling complex geometries. Several figures have been included to show the various steps of the algorithm as well as final results.