A new indirect anisotropic quadrilateral mesh generation scheme with enhanced local mesh smoothing procedures

International Journal for Numerical Methods in Engineering, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Vol 58, Num 2, pp.277-300, July 2003

MESHING
RESEARCH
CORNER

Abstract

An enhanced version of indirect advancing front technique is proposed for the construction of full quadrilateral anisotropic meshes on 3D surfaces. The final quadrilateral mesh is constructed from a background triangular mesh and the merging procedure is carried out in the parametric space. The proposed method employed the systemic merging technique for the formation of quadrilaterals and the metric specifications for controlling the anisotropic characteristics of the elements. In order to generate well-graded anisotropic quadrilaterals, the selection criteria of base segment for merging are carefully defined. Furthermore, in order to improve the shape quality of the final mesh, a set of new local smoothing algorithms for anisotropic quadrilateral mesh quality enhancement has been proposed and tested in this study. Numerical examples obtained indicate that the proposed enhanced local smoothing schemes can effectively improve the quality of the quadrilateral meshes produced and increase the robustness of the mesh generation scheme.