Method for generating high-quality tetrahedral meshes of geological models by utilizing CGAL

Abstract

High-quality computational meshes are crucial in the analysis of displacements and stabilities of rock and soil masses. In this paper, we present a method for generating high-quality tetrahedral meshes of geological models to be used in stability analyses of rock and soil masses. The method is implemented by utilizing the Computational Geometry Algorithms Library (CGAL). The input is a geological model consisting of triangulated surfaces, and the output is a high-quality tetrahedral mesh of the geological model. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the presented method, we apply it to generate a series of computational meshes of geological model, and we then analyse the stabilities of the rock and soil slopes on the basis of the generated tetrahedral mesh models. The applications demonstrate the effectiveness and practicability of the present method.•A method for generating high-quality tetrahedral meshes of geological models is presented.•We evaluate the quality of the tetrahedral mesh of geological model using four metrics.•Three applications demonstrate the effectiveness and practicability of the presented method.