On Combining Laplacian and Optimization-Based Mesh Smoothing Techniques

AMD-Vol. 220 Trends in Unstructured Mesh Generation, ASME, pp.37-43, July 1997

MESHING
RESEARCH
CORNER

Mathematics and Computer Science Division
Argonne National Laboratory
Argonne, Illinois 60439
email: freitag@mcs.anl.gov

presented at
The 1997 Joint ASME/ASCE/SES Summer Meeting
June 29-July 2, 1997
Northwestern University
Evanston Illinois

Abstract
Local mesh smoothing algorithms have been shown to be effective in repairing distorted elements in automatically generated meshes. The simplest such algorithm is Laplacian smoothing, which moves grid points to the geometric center of incident vertices. Unfortunately, this method operates heuristically and can create invalid meshes or elements of worse quality than those contained in the original mesh. In contrast, optimization-based methods are designed to maximize some measure of mesh quality and are very effective at eliminating extremal angles in the mesh. These improvements come at a higher computational cost, however. In this article we propose four smoothing techniques that combine a smart variant of Laplacian smoothing with an optimization-based approach. Several numerical experiments are performed that compare the mesh quality and computational cost for each of the methods in two and three dimensions. We find that the combined approaches are very cost effective and yield high-quality meshes.

Download from author's site: ftp://info.mcs.anl.gov/pub/tech_reports/plassman/lori_combined.ps.Z