Mesh Association: Formulation and Algorithms

Proceedings, 8th International Meshing Roundtable, South Lake Tahoe, CA, U.S.A., pp.75-82, October 1999

MESHING
RESEARCH
CORNER

Herbert Edelsbrunner
Department of Computer Science, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708
Email: edels@cs.duke.edu

Michael T. Heath
Department of computer Science, University of Illinois, Urbana, IL 61801
Email: heath@cs.uiuc.edu

Abstract
In computational simulation of coupled, multicomponent systems, it is frequently necessary to transfer data between meshes that may differ in resolution structure, and discretization methodology. Typically, nodes from one mesh must be associated with elements of another mesh. In this paper, we formulate mesh association as a geometric problem and introduce two efficient mesh association algorithms. One of these algorithms requires linear time in the worst case if the meshes are well shaped and geometrically well aligned. Our formulation of the problem and our algorithms are more general than previous work and can be applied to surface meshes with curved elements.

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