Generating Hexahedron-Dominant Mesh Based on Shrinking-Mapping Method

Proceedings, 6th International Meshing Roundtable, Sandia National Laboratories, pp.171-182, October 1997

MESHING
RESEARCH
CORNER

Department of Computing Science, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, T6G 2H1, weidong@cs.ualberta.ca

Abstract
This paper presents an algorithm based on shrunken polyhedron and mapping to mesh a convex polyhedron using mixed elements, with mostly hexahedra, but including some tetrahedra, pyramids, and wedges. It is part of a scheme for automatically meshing an arbitrary SD geometry. The scheme first decomposes a 3D geometry into a set of convex polyhedra. Then the boundary quadrilateral meshes of these convex polyhedra are formed. For every convex polyhedron, the algorithm proposed in this paper generates shrunken polyhedra one by one and uses hexahedron, wedge, pyramid and tetrahedron to fill between two adjacent polyhedra. The 2D boundary meshes of a convex polyhedron are mapped to the boundary polygons of the shrunken polyhedron. The mixed hexahedron mesh is generated based on the mapping relations and on the ending cases for the 2D meshes without direct mapping relation.

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