High Quality Anisotropic Tetrahedral Mesh Generation Via Ellipsoidal Bubble Packing

Proceedings, 9th International Meshing Roundtable, Sandia National Laboratories, pp.263-273, October 2000

MESHING
RESEARCH
CORNER

Soji Yamakawa and Kenji Shimada
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, U.S.A
Email: soji@andrew.cmu.edu, shimada@cmu.edu

Abstract
This paper presents a new computational method for anisotropic tetrahedral meshing that (1) can control shapes of the elements by an arbitraiy anisotropy function, and (2) can avoid ill-shaped elements induced from poorly distributed node locations. Our method creates a tetrahedral mesh in two steps. First our method obtains node locations through a physically based particle simulation, which we call bubble packing. Ellipsoidal bubbles are closely packed on the boundary and inside a geometric domain, and nodes are placed at the centers of the bubbles. Our method then connects the nodes to create a tet mesh by the advancing front method. Experimental results show that our method can create a high quality anisotropic tetrahedral mesh that conforms well to the input anisotropy.

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