Development of a Tetrahedral Mesh Generator Based on Constrained Delaunay Triangulation

Abstract

The article describes the basic principles of operation of the finite element mesh generator SMCMGrid, which is an integral part of the SMCM software package designed to solve problems in the mechanics of composite materials and structures, which was developed at the Scientific-educational center on supercomputer modeling and software engineering of Bauman Moscow State Technical University (BMSTU SIMPLEX CENTER). The paper describes a software pipeline for constructing high-quality tetrahedral unstructured meshes for arbitrary shape B-rep models based on constrained Delaunay triangulation. We have presented the main algorithms for generating meshes on the edges and surfaces of the model, which make it possible to create the so-called simplicial complex, for which it is then possible to construct a constrained Delaunay triangulation and create the final tetrahedral mesh of the required quality. The mesh is generated in a Riemannian space with a given metric that takes into account the required characteristics of the mesh at each point of the geometric model. We gave examples of finite element meshes for various geometric models of engineering structure elements, including composite materials, and also demonstrated the adequacy of the results of solving the elasticity problem on a mesh built using the SMCMGrid generator. The results of the work led to the conclusion that the presented generator can be used to solve problems of engineering analysis and modeling.