Extraction of crack-free isosurfaces from adaptive mesh refinement data

Abstract

Adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) is a numerical simulation technique used in computational fluid dynamics (CFD). It permits the efficient simulation of phenomena characterized by substantially varying scales in complexity of local behavior of certain variables. By using a set of nested grids at different resolutions, AMR combines the simplicity of structured rectilinear grids with the possibility to adapt to local changes in complexity and spatial resolution. Hierarchical representations of scientific data pose challenges when isosurfaces are extracted. Cracks can arise at the boundaries between regions represented at different resolutions. We present a method for the extraction of isosurfaces from AMR data that avoids cracks at the boundaries between levels of different resolution.