1,100 research outputs found
Variational tetrahedral meshing
In this paper, a novel Delaunay-based variational approach to isotropic tetrahedral meshing is presented. To achieve both robustness and efficiency, we minimize a simple mesh-dependent energy through global updates of both vertex positions and connectivity. As this energy is known to be the ā 1 distance between an isotropic quadratic function and its linear interpolation on the mesh, our minimization procedure generates well-shaped tetrahedra. Mesh design is controlled through a gradation smoothness parameter and selection of the desired number of vertices. We provide the foundations of our approach by explaining both the underlying variational principle and its geometric interpretation. We demonstrate the quality of the resulting meshes through a series of examples
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
Well-Centered Triangulation
Meshes composed of well-centered simplices have nice orthogonal dual meshes
(the dual Voronoi diagram). This is useful for certain numerical algorithms
that prefer such primal-dual mesh pairs. We prove that well-centered meshes
also have optimality properties and relationships to Delaunay and minmax angle
triangulations. We present an iterative algorithm that seeks to transform a
given triangulation in two or three dimensions into a well-centered one by
minimizing a cost function and moving the interior vertices while keeping the
mesh connectivity and boundary vertices fixed. The cost function is a direct
result of a new characterization of well-centeredness in arbitrary dimensions
that we present. Ours is the first optimization-based heuristic for
well-centeredness, and the first one that applies in both two and three
dimensions. We show the results of applying our algorithm to small and large
two-dimensional meshes, some with a complex boundary, and obtain a
well-centered tetrahedralization of the cube. We also show numerical evidence
that our algorithm preserves gradation and that it improves the maximum and
minimum angles of acute triangulations created by the best known previous
method.Comment: Content has been added to experimental results section. Significant
edits in introduction and in summary of current and previous results. Minor
edits elsewher
3D mesh processing using GAMer 2 to enable reaction-diffusion simulations in realistic cellular geometries
Recent advances in electron microscopy have enabled the imaging of single
cells in 3D at nanometer length scale resolutions. An uncharted frontier for in
silico biology is the ability to simulate cellular processes using these
observed geometries. Enabling such simulations requires watertight meshing of
electron micrograph images into 3D volume meshes, which can then form the basis
of computer simulations of such processes using numerical techniques such as
the Finite Element Method. In this paper, we describe the use of our recently
rewritten mesh processing software, GAMer 2, to bridge the gap between poorly
conditioned meshes generated from segmented micrographs and boundary marked
tetrahedral meshes which are compatible with simulation. We demonstrate the
application of a workflow using GAMer 2 to a series of electron micrographs of
neuronal dendrite morphology explored at three different length scales and show
that the resulting meshes are suitable for finite element simulations. This
work is an important step towards making physical simulations of biological
processes in realistic geometries routine. Innovations in algorithms to
reconstruct and simulate cellular length scale phenomena based on emerging
structural data will enable realistic physical models and advance discovery at
the interface of geometry and cellular processes. We posit that a new frontier
at the intersection of computational technologies and single cell biology is
now open.Comment: 39 pages, 14 figures. High resolution figures and supplemental movies
available upon reques
A Variational r-Adaption and Shape-Optimization Method for Finite-Deformation Elasticity
This paper is concerned with the formulation of a variational r-adaption method for finite-deformation elastostatic problems. The distinguishing characteristic of the method is that the variational principle simultaneously supplies the solution, the optimal mesh and, in problems of shape optimization, the equilibrium shapes of the system. This is accomplished by minimizing the energy functional with respect to the nodal field values as well as with respect to the triangulation of the domain of analysis. Energy minimization with respect to the referential nodal positions has the effect of equilibrating the energetic or configurational forces acting on the nodes. We derive general expressions for the configuration forces for isoparametric elements and nonlinear, possibly anisotropic, materials under general loading. We illustrate the versatility and convergence characteristics of the method by way of selected numerical tests and applications, including the problem of a semi-infinite crack in linear and nonlinear elastic bodies; and the optimization of the shape of elastic inclusions
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