Formula omitted] Bézier CAD Surrogates for anisotropic mesh adaptation

Abstract

Mesh generation and adaptation rely heavily on BREPs created by proprietary CAD software, piecewise parametric descriptions of geometry from which numerous problems arise: model continuity is only enforced up to a tolerance often higher than required mesh sizes, projection is costly and prone to error, derivatives – thus normals and surface curvatures – may not be well defined, unintended small features driving unnecessary mesh complexity may be present... High-order surface meshes can be used as a faster and more robust alternative, at a small expense of memory. P3 meshes, in particular, are the first degree for which G1 continuity at the vertices may be enforced while retaining degrees of freedom to improve geometric accuracy. In this paper, we exhibit the ability of these P3 CAD surrogates to drive anisotropic surface adaptation in place of traditional CAD systems through the example of an adaptation loop using a highly anisotropic metric field on the complex geometry of the HL-CRM wing model with flaps.