Generation of multi-axis swept mesh in a global way

Abstract

Multi-axis sweeping is an important tool to generate hexahedral meshes for solid models which are composed of swept volumes with different sweep directions. However, traditional multi-axis sweeping algorithms either fail to handle complex grafting relationships between swept volumes or are easy to produce hexahedral elements with bad quality around the graft surfaces. To achieve a high-quality multi-axis swept mesh, this paper proposes a global approach to multi-axis swept mesh generation, which can robustly generate hexahedral meshes for solid models composed by swept volumes with different sweep directions. We first generate all surface meshes globally by applying an optimized structured quadrilateral mesh generation algorithm. After that, we generate a swept mesh for each swept volume. Finally, we determine an appropriate way to optimize the topology of the generated mesh so as to improve the mesh quality. The experimental results show the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method.