A Novel Tetrahedral Mesh Generation Algorithm for Finite Element Analysis

Abstract

In this paper, a robust tetrahedral mesh generation method based on Advancing Front technique is proposed. The proposed method inherits advantages of Delaunay method and Advancing Front method, such as efficiency of Delaunay method and maintaining the given boundary triangle mesh exactly of advancing front method. Tetrahedral mesh is generated from the given triangle surface mesh. This method mainly includes three stages. Firstly, the minimum container box of the triangular surface mesh is calculated and points are inserted into the box. Then the proper point is selected out to generate tetrahedron’s layers from surface to the interior volume of the model, so g the surface mesh can be maintained. The operation is simplified, and calculation efficiency is also higher than common Advancing Front method. At last, triangle intersection is examined. This technique allows generating the tetrahedral mesh with high quality elements with surface mesh preservation. A shoes model with both convex and concave surface is chosen for the experiment. The result clarified the robust and high efficiency of the proposed algorithm.