Adaptive and Quality Quadrilateral/Hexahedral Meshing from Volumetric Data

Proceedings, 13th International Meshing Roundtable, Williamsburg, VA, Sandia National Laboratories, SAND #2004-3765C, pp.365-376, September 19-22 2004

MESHING
RESEARCH
CORNER

13th International Meshing Roundtable
Willimasburg, Virginia, USA
September 19-22, 2004

Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences
Department of Computer Sciences
The University of Texas at Austin

Abstract
This paper describes an algorithm to extract adaptive and quality quadrilateral/hexahedral meshes directly from volumetric data. First, a bottom-up surface topology preserving octree-based algorithm is applied to select a starting octree level. Then the dual contouring method is used to extract a preliminary uniform quad/hex mesh, which is decomposed into finer quads/hexes adaptively without introducing any hanging nodes. The positions of all boundary vertices are recalculated to approximate the boundary surface more accurately. Mesh adaptivity can be controlled by a feature sensitive error function, the regions that users are interested in, or finite element calculation results. Finally, a relaxation based technique is deployed to improve mesh quality. Several demonstration examples are provided from a wide variety of application domains. Some extracted meshes have been extensively used in finite element simulations.

Download Full Paper (PDF Format)