Building Space-Time Meshes Over Arbitrary Spatial Domains

Proceedings, 11th International Meshing Roundtable, Sandia National Laboratories, pp.391-403, September 15-18 2002

MESHING
RESEARCH
CORNER

11th International Meshing Roundtable
Ithaca, New York, USA
September 15-18, 2002

JeffErickson
Dept. of Computer Science,
Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,
jee@cs.uiuc.edu

Damrong Guoy
Computational Science & Engineering Prog.,
Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,
guoy@uiuc.edu

John M. Sullivan
Dept. of Mathematics,
Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,
jms@math.uiuc.edu

Alper Ungor
Dept. of Computer Science, Duke Univ.,
ungor@cs.duke.edu

Abstract
We present an algorithm to construct meshes suitable for space-time discontinuous Galerkin nite-element methods. Our method generalizes and improves the `Tent Pitcher' algorithm of Ungor and Sheffer. Given an arbitrary simplicially meshed domain X of any dimension and a time interval [0; T], our algorithm builds a simplicial mesh of the space-time domain X [0; T], in constant time per element. Our algorithm avoids the limitations of previous methods by carefully adapting the durations of space-time elements to the local quality and feature size of the underlying space mesh.

Download Full Paper (Postscript Format)