Boolean operations on arbitrary polygonal and polyhedral meshes

Abstract

A linearithmic floating-point arithmetic algorithm designed for solving usual boolean operations (intersection, union, and difference) on arbitrary polygonal and polyhedral meshes is described in this paper. This method does not dis-feature the inputs which can be two volume meshes, two surface meshes or one of each. It provides conformal meshes upon exit. It can be used in many pre- and post-processing applications in computational physics (e.g. cut-cell volume mesh generation or conservative remapping). The core idea is to consider any configuration as a polygonal cloud. The polygons are first triangulated, the intersections are solved, the polyhedral cells are then reconstructed from the conformal triangles cloud and finally their triangular faces are re-aggregated to polygons. This approach offers great flexibility regarding the admissible topologies: non-planar faces, concave faces or cells and some non-manifoldness are handled. The algorithm is described in detail and some current results are shown.