Two‐dimensional mesh generation, adaptive remeshing and refinement

Abstract

Abstract This paper discusses the generation of unstructured triangular meshes by the advancing front technique. We also employ the technique to discretize surfaces. A simple and effective algorithm for the specification of element sizes is described. A similar idea is then applied to adaptive remeshing where a completely new mesh is created on the basis of the isolines of a certain important variable. The isolines are obtained from the FE‐calculation based on the previous mesh. In this paper, attention is focused on the Poisson's equation. The optimal a priori error estimate for the problem is used to estimate the number of isolines needed for the remeshing. When the estimated error exceeds the tolerance in only a small part of the domain, the adaptive procedure is switched automatically to an adaptive refinement.