Adaptive Finite Element Surface Remeshing

Numerical Grid Generation in Computational Field Simulations, Ed. M. Cross., B. K. Soni, J. F. Thompson, J. Hauser, P. R. Eiseman, Proceedings of the 6th International Conference, held at the University of Greenwich, pp.371-380, July 1998

MESHING
RESEARCH
CORNER

INRIA, Projet GAMMA
Domaine de Voluceau-Rocquencourt
78153 Le Chesnay, FRANCE

Abstract
This paper presents a surface mesh optimization procedure suitable to obtain a geometric finite element mesh, given an initial arbitrary surface triangulation and an element size map. The first stage consists in extracting a simplified (coarse) mesh from the triangulation prior to define a continuous geometric support, representing an adequate approximation of the underlying surface geometry. This initial mesh is then optimized so as to conform the prescribed size map. Examples are provided to illustrate the efficiency of the proposed approach.