Paving: A new approach to automated quadrilateral mesh generation

TLDR

The paper introduces the paving technique, an automated method for generating all‑quadrilateral meshes for arbitrary 2‑D geometries, and evaluates its performance with examples. Paving uses an algorithmic/heuristic approach that allows variable element sizes on boundaries and interiors, producing nearly square elements perpendicular to boundaries that follow geometric contours. The resulting meshes are well‑formed, nearly square, boundary‑perpendicular, and geometrically pleasing, with contours aligning closely to the domain boundaries.

Abstract

Abstract This paper presents a new mesh generation technique, paving , which meshes arbitrary 2‐D geometries with an all‐quadrilateral mesh. Paving allows varying element size distributions on the boundary as well as the interior of a region. The generated mesh is well formed (i.e. nearly square elements, elements perpendicular to boundaries, etc.) and geometrically pleasing (i.e. mesh contours tend to follow geometric contours of the boundary). In this paper we describe the theory behind this algorithmic/heuristic technique, evaluate the performance of the approach and present examples of automatically generated meshes.