Hexahedral Mesh Generation using the Embedded Voronoi Graph

Proceedings, 7th International Meshing Roundtable, Sandia National Lab, pp.347-364, October 1998

MESHING
RESEARCH
CORNER

7th International Meshing Roundtable
October 26-28, 1998
Dearborn, Michigan, USA

Institute of Computer Science,
The Hebrew University,
Jerusalem 91904, Israel.
Email: { sheffa, michals, arir, berco } @cs.huji.ac.il
Web: http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/{ ~sheffa, ~michals, ~arir, ~berco }

Abstract
This work presents a new approach for automatic hexahedral meshing, based on the embedded Voronoi graph. The embedded Voronoi graph contains the full symbolic information of the Voronoi diagram and the medial axis of the object, and a geometric approximation to the real geometry. The embedded Voronoi graph is used for decomposing the object, with the guiding principle that resulting sub-volumes are sweepable. Sub-volumes are meshed independently, and the resulting meshes are combined and smoothed to yield the final mesh.

The approach presented here is general and automatic. It handles any volume, even if its medial axis is degenerate. The embedded Voronoi graph provides complete information regarding proximity and adjacency relationships between the entities of the volume. Hence, decomposition faces are determined unambiguously, without any further geometric computations. The sub-volumes computed by the algorithm are guaranteed to be well-defined and disjoint. The size of the decomposition is relatively small since every sub-volume contains a different Voronoi face. Mesh quality seems high since the decomposition avoids generation of sharp angles, and sweep and other basic methods are used to mesh the sub-volumes.

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