A New Approach to Octree-Based Hexahedral Meshing

Proceedings, 10th International Meshing Roundtable, Sandia National Laboratories, pp.209-221, October 7-10 2001

MESHING
RESEARCH
CORNER

10th International Meshing Roundtable
Newport Beach, California, U.S.A.
October 7-10, 2001

SIMULOG & INRIA, Gamma Project,
Domaine de Voluceau, Rocquencourt,
BP 105, 78153 Le Chesnay Cedex, France.
Email: loic.marechal@inria.fr

Abstract
A number of algorithms have been proposed to fulfill the strong demand for fully automated all-hexahedral meshers. Since none of them solved thoroughly the problem, people divided it into simpler ones. They enumerated the major kinds of configurations encountered'n industry and tried to develop a set of applications, each of them focusing on a single problem. This paper presents a new approach to the octree-based algorithm and aims to add a new solution to the engineer "hex-to.olkit". This method has been introduced by R. Schneiders [15] and is, likewise, done in three steps: (i) An octree structure is built around a discrete geometry. (ii) A conformal, all-hexahedral mesh is generated by inserting the so-called conforming patterns (which are completely new ones). (iii) The boundary of the geometry is recovered by a smoothing technique. This rough method is fast and automated for any kind of geometries. Furthermore, mesh adaptation for finite element computation is easily implemented, thanks to the octree hierarchic structure.