Tetrahedral mesh improvement using moving mesh smoothing, lazy searching flips, and RBF surface reconstruction

Given a tetrahedral mesh and objective functionals measuring the mesh quality which take into account the shape, size, and orientation of the mesh elements, our aim is to improve the mesh quality as much as possible. In this paper, we combine the moving mesh smoothing, based on the integration of an ordinary differential equation coming from a given functional, with the lazy flip technique, a reversible edge removal algorithm to modify the mesh connectivity. Moreover, we utilize radial basis function (RBF) surface reconstruction to improve tetrahedral meshes with curved boundary surfaces. Numerical tests show that the combination of these techniques into a mesh improvement framework achieves results which are comparable and even better than the previously reported ones.Comment: Revised and improved versio

Tetrahedral Mesh Improvement Using Moving Mesh Smoothing and Lazy Searching Flips

In this paper we combine two new smoothing and flipping techniques. The moving mesh smoothing is based on the integration of an ordinary differential coming from a given functional. The lazy flip technique is a reversible edge removal algorithm to automatically search flips for local quality improvement. On itself, these strategies already provide good mesh improvement, but their combination achieves astonishing results which have not been reported so far. Provided numerical examples show that we can obtain final tetrahedral meshes with dihedral angles between 40 and 123 degrees. We compare the new method with other publicly available mesh improving codes

A Parallel Local Reconnection Approach for Tetrahedral Mesh Improvement

AbstractA multi-threaded parallel local reconnection algorithm is proposed for tetrahedral meshes. It defines a feature point within the region involved in each operation, and sorts the features points along a Hilbert curve. The decomposition of this Hilbert curve results in a load-balanced distribution of local operations. Meanwhile, the regions of concurrently executed local operations are separated far away, such that the possibility of interference is reduced to a very low level. Finally, a parallel mesh improver is developed by combining the proposed algorithm with a parallel mesh smoothing algorithm, and its effectiveness and efficiency is verified in various numerical experiments

TetGen, towards a quality tetrahedral mesh generator

TetGen is a C++ program for generating quality tetrahedral meshes aimed to support numerical methods and scientific computing. It is also a research project for studying the underlying mathematical problems and evaluating algorithms. This paper presents the essential meshing components developed in TetGen for robust and efficient software implementation. And it highlights the state-of-the-art algorithms and technologies currently implemented and developed in TetGen for automatic quality tetrahedral mesh generation

Shape optimization with a level set based mesh evolution method

International audienceIn this article, we discuss an approach for geometry and topology optimization of structures which benefits from an accurate description of shapes at each stage of the iterative process - by means of a mesh amenable for mechanical analyses - while retaining the whole versatility of the level set method when it comes to accounting for their evolution. The key ingredients of this method are two operators for switching from a meshed representation of a domain to an implicit one, and conversely; this notably brings into play an algorithm for generating the signed distance function to an arbitrary discrete domain, and a mesh generation algorithm for implicitly-defined geometries

Unstructured Mesh Generation and Adaptation

International audienceWe first describe the well established unstructured mesh generation methods as involved in the computational pipeline, from geometry definition to surface and volume mesh generation. These components are always a preliminary and required step to any numerical computations. From an historical point of view, the generation of fully unstructured mesh generation in 3D has been a real challenge so as to the design of robust and accurate second order schemes on such unstructured meshes. If the issue of generating volume meshes for geometries of any complexity is now mostly solved, the emergence of robust numerical schemes on unstructured meshes has paved the way to adaptivity. Indeed, unstructured meshes in contrast with structured or block structured grids have the necessary flexibility to control the discretization both in size and orientation. In the second part, we review the main components to perform adaptative computations: (i) anisotropic mesh prescription via a metric field tensor (ii) anisotropic error estimates, and (iii) anisotropic mesh generation. For each component, we focus on a particularly simple method to implement. In particular, we describe a simple but robust strategy for generating anisotropic meshes. Each adaptation entity, ie surface, volume or boundary layers, relies on a specific metric tensor field. The metric-based surface estimate is then used to control the deviation to the surface and to adapt the surface mesh. The volume estimate aims at controlling the interpolation error of a specific field of the flow. Several 3D examples issued from steady and unsteady simulations from systems of hyper-bolic laws are presented. In particular, we show that despite the simplicity of the introduced adaptive meshing scheme a high level of anisotropy can be reached. This includes the direct prediction of the sonic boom of an aircraft by computing the flow from the cruise altitude to the ground, the interaction between shock waves and boundary layer, or the prediction of complex unsteady phenomena in 3D

Improved Boundary Constrained Tetrahedral Mesh Generation by Shell Transformation

An excessive number of Steiner points may be inserted during the process of boundary recovery for constrained tetrahedral mesh generation, and these Steiner points are harmful in some circumstances. In this study, a new flip named shell transformation is proposed to reduce the usage of Steiner points in boundary recovery and thus to improve the performance of boundary recovery in terms of robustness, efficiency and element quality. Shell transformation searches for a local optimal mesh among multiple choices. Meanwhile, its recursive callings can perform flips on a much larger element set than a single flip, thereby leading the way to a better local optimum solution. By employing shell transformation properly, a mesh that intersects predefined constraints intensively can be transformed to another one with much fewer intersections, thus remarkably reducing the occasions of Steiner point insertion. Besides, shell transformation can be used to remove existing Steiner points by flipping the mesh aggressively. Meshing examples for various industrial applications and surface inputs mainly composed of stretched triangles are presented to illustrate how the improved algorithm works on difficult boundary constrained meshing tasks

Incompressible lagrangian fluid flow with thermal coupling

A method is presented for the solution of an incompressible viscous fluid flow with heat transfer and solidification using a fully Lagrangian description of the motion. The originality of this method consists in assembling various concepts and techniques which appear naturally due to the Lagrangian formulation. First of all, the Navier-Stokes equations of motion coupled with the Boussinesq approximation must be reformulated in the Lagrangian framework, whereas they have been mostly derived in an Eulerian context. Secondly, the Lagrangian formulation implies to follow the material particles during their motion, which means to convect the mesh in the case of the Finite Element Method (FEM), the spatial discretisation method chosen in this work. This provokes various difficulties for the mesh generation, mainly in three dimensions, whereas it eliminates the classical numerical difficulty to deal with the convective term, as much in the Navier-Stokes equations as in the energy equation. Even without the discretization of the convective term, an efficient iterative solver, which constitutes the only viable alternative for three dimensional problems, must be designed for the class of Generalized Stokes Problems (GSP), which could be able to behave well independently of the mesh Reynolds number, as it can vary greatly for coupled fluid-thermal analysis. Moreover, it offers a natural framework to treat free-surface problems like wave breaking and rough fluid-structure contact. On one hand, the convection of the mesh during one time step after the resolution of the non-linear system provides explicitly the locus of the domain to be considered. On the other hand, fluid-to-fluid and fluid-to-wall contact, as well as the update of the domain due to the remeshing, must be accurately and efficiently performed. Finally, the solidification of the fluid coupled with its motion through a variable viscosity is considered An efficient overall algorithm must be designed to bring the method effective, particularly in a three dimensional context, which is the ambition of this monograph. Various numerical examples are included to validate and highlight the potential of the method

Incompressible Lagrangian fluid flow with thermal coupling

In this monograph is presented a method for the solution of an incompressible viscous fluid flow with heat transfer and solidification usin a fully Lagrangian description on the motion. The originality of this method consists in assembling various concepts and techniques which appear naturally due to the Lagrangian formulation.Postprint (published version

Drift-diffusion models for innovative semiconductor devices and their numerical solution

We present charge transport models for novel semiconductor devices which may include ionic species as well as their thermodynamically consistent finite volume discretization