Open AccessSurface smoothing and quality improvement of quadrilateral/hexahedral meshes with geometric flow
Author(s) -
Zhang Yongjie,
Bajaj Chandrajit,
Xu Guoliang
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
communications in numerical methods in engineering
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 1099-0887
pISSN - 1069-8299
DOI - 10.1002/cnm.1067
Subject(s) - polygon mesh , hexahedron , quadrilateral , volume mesh , surface (topology) , tangent space , tangent , geometry , vertex (graph theory) , mathematics , smoothing , finite element method , computer science , algorithm , mesh generation , engineering , computer vision , combinatorics , structural engineering , graph
This paper describes an approach to smooth the surface and improve the quality of quadrilateral/hexahedral meshes with feature preserved using geometric flow. For quadrilateral surface meshes, the surface diffusion flow is selected to remove noise by relocating vertices in the normal direction, and the aspect ratio is improved with feature preserved by adjusting vertex positions in the tangent direction. For hexahedral meshes, besides the surface vertex movement in the normal and tangent directions, interior vertices are relocated to improve the aspect ratio. Our method has the properties of noise removal, feature preservation and quality improvement of quadrilateral/hexahedral meshes, and it is especially suitable for biomolecular meshes because the surface diffusion flow preserves sphere accurately if the initial surface is close to a sphere. Several demonstration examples are provided from a wide variety of application domains. Some extracted meshes have been extensively used in finite element simulations. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.