Advancing Front Surface Mesh Generation in Parametric Space Using a Riemannian Surface Definition.

Abstract

A method is presented for meshing 3D CAD surfaces in parametric space using an advancing front approach and a metric map to govern the size and shape of the triangles in the parametric space. The creation of the metric map will be discussed. The advancing front mesher generates triangles based on the metric map, stretching them in order to capture the change in parameterization of the surface. The benefits of this algorithm include better quality elements without having to do costly real space calculations. Keywords: Triangulation, free surface meshing, Riemannian metric, CAE, finite elements 1. Introduction 1.1 Importance of work The finite element method is a powerful tool for today's engineering community. One of the barriers to automating finite element analysis is robust automatic mesh generation on CAD surfaces. There are many manual, semi-automatic, and automatic methods available today, and all have their own advantages and drawbacks 1 . Current commercial codes tend to use ...