Nibble meshing: incremental triangulation of non-manifold solid boundary

Abstract

A computational method, called Nibble algorithm, for triangulation of non-manifold solid boundary is proposed. The algorithm is based on an incremental boundary traversal technique. The mesh generator creates a mesh element-by-element until the whole region is covered no matter the domain complexity (faces with non-convex shapes and multi-connected boundaries are treated). At each step of the algorithm, a surface boundary called active boundary is evaluated in such a way that it nibbles the surface to be triangulated. The fundamental feature of this process is the definition of an area, called influence zone, which controls the node insertion and thus avoids edge intersection tests. Further, the generated mesh is refined through an extension of the Laplacian smoothing. It allows an optimization of the smoothing quality without saturating the time complexity. A new technique for adaptive smoothing is also applied in order to speed up the mesh refinement.