Modified Tetrahedral Mesh Subdivision Method and Its Application in 3D Geological Body Discrete Analysis

Abstract

Tetrahedral mesh has excellent properties such as being easy to be edited and suitable for simulating the complex geological body. However, classical algorithms for tetrahedral mesh generation such as Delaunay tetrahedral mesh algorithm, Advancing Front Technique (AFT) and Octree algorithm still have problem of low efficiency. Here three aspects Delaunay tetrahedral mesh algorithm are modified to improve its performance in geological applications. Optimization of efficiency is divided into two parts: macro-optimization and micro-optimization. The macro-optimization is to increase efficiency through the data pre-processing. For the micro-optimization, a practical topological structure is proposed to construct the topological relationships among the points, edges and triangles to achieve more efficient search speed. On the other hand, the sliver of tetrahedral mesh will affect its quality seriously. We classify the slivers into different types and eliminate these slivers by different methods. This improved approach is applied to gold mine reserve estimation of Zij in Mine, Fujian, China. The result shows the modified algorithm is robust and its performance is better than traditional method.