Surface Grid Generation on Intersecting Spheres

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.717-726, July 1998

MESHING
RESEARCH
CORNER

Patrick Laug
INRIA Rocquencourt, BP 105,78153 Le Chesnay Cedex, France
E-mail: Patiick.Laug@inria.fr

Houman Borouchaki
UTT, 12 rue Marie Curie, BP 2060, 10010 Trayes Cedex, France
E-mail: Houman.Borouchaki@univ-troyes.fr

Abstract
In the field of CAD or grid generation, it is convenient to represent a surface by means of a parametric form such as Bezier, B-spline or NURBS. In this paper, we introduce a more specific representation for surfaces composed of intersect- ing spheres. We describe our methods and algorithms to create grids on these particular surfaces and discuss the quality of these grids. Finally, we show some applications in the field of chemistry, where a molecule can be represented as a union of spherical atoms.