Terahedral Meshing Algorithm Using Basic Operators

Chae, Soo-Won and Jong-Soo Kim

Proceedings, 4th International Meshing Roundtable, Sandia National Laboratories, pp.305-318, October 1995

Introduction Today's concurrent engineering environment requires the finite element analysis as being a tool for optimizing a design. Therefore, in order to test various designs within a limited time interval, the time spent on the analysis should be as short as possible. In this point of view, automation of modeling process especially the mesh generation for finite element analysis has been recognized as an important issue.

Although two dimensional mesh generation algorithms are many, relatively few mesh generation algorithms are available for three-dimenaional problems. For three-dimensioanl mesh generation, both tetrahedral and hexahedral elements are considered and some algorithms seem promissing. In this paper we introduce a new tetrahedral meshing algorithm using basic operators which is an extension of the author's previous work. The surfaces of three-dimensional objects in our algorithm include planar, cylindrical, B-spline and blending surfaces and 10-noded tetrahedral elements are employed for the mesh generation.

In our scheme, the surfaces of a three-dimensional object are triangulated first and then tetrahedral elements are generated from the outside boundary surfaces toward the inside by cutting the corner edges of the loop-boundary edges. The comcept of our algorithm can be considered to be similar to that of the advancing front techniques in the sense that the algorithm starts from outside boundary toward inside of the objects.

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