An Approach to Combined Laplacian and Optimization-Based Smoothing for Triangular, Quadrilateral, and Quad-Dominant Meshes

7th International Meshing Roundtable, Sandia National Labs, pp.479-494, October 1998

MESHING
RESEARCH
CORNER

7th International Meshing Roundtable
October 26-28, 1998
Dearborn, Michigan, U.S.A.

ANSYS Design Development Department
ANSYS, Inc.
Canonsburg, PA USA

Abstract
Automatic finite element mesh generation techniques have become commonly used tools for the analysis of complex, real-world models. All of these methods can however, create distorted and even unusable elements. Fortunately, several techniques exist which can take an existing mesh and improve its quality. Smoothing is one such method, which repositions nodal locations, so as to minimize element distortion. In this paper, an overall mesh smoothing scheme is presented for meshes consisting of triangular, quadrilateral, mixed triangular and quadrilateral, tetrahedral or mixed tetrahedral/pyramid elements. The approach describes an efficient and robust combination of constrained Laplacian smoothing together with an optimization- based smoothing algorithm. Results are presented for several example models.

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