Force-Directed Methods for Smoothing Unstructured Triangular and Tetrahedral Meshes

Proceedings, 9th International Meshing Roundtable, Sandia National Laboratories, pp.395-406, October 2000

MESHING
RESEARCH
CORNER

Hristo N. Djidjev
Department of Computer Science, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK

Abstract
We develop and implement new algorithms for smoothing triangular and tetrahedral unstructured meshes. Our approach is based on a variation of the force-directed method used in graph drawing. This method assumes that on each vertex a certain force is applied that moves the vertex relative to its neighbors so that the shapes of its incident elements are improved. The final stable configuration often corresponds to a graph with good global properties. In this paper we show that this method can be successfully applied to mesh smoothing and describe some details of our implementation and test results.

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