Quadrilateral and hexahedral mesh generation based on surface foliation theory

Abstract

For the purpose of isogeometric analysis, one of the most common ways is to construct structured hexahedral meshes, which have regular tensor product structure, and fit them by volumetric T-Splines. This theoretic work proposes a novel surface quadrilateral meshing method, colorable quad-mesh, which leads to the structured hexahedral mesh of the enclosed volume for high genus surfaces.The work proves the equivalence relations among colorable quad-meshes, finite measured foliations and Strebel differentials on surfaces. This trinity theorem lays down the theoretic foundation for quadrilateral/hexahedral mesh generation, and leads to practical, automatic algorithms.The work proposes the following algorithm: the user inputs a set of disjoint, simple loops on a high genus surface, and specifies a height parameter for each loop; a unique Strebel differential is computed with the combinatorial type and the heights prescribed by the user’s input; the Strebel differential assigns a flat metric on the surface and decomposes the surface into cylinders; a colorable quad-mesh is generated by splitting each cylinder into two quadrilaterals, followed by subdivision; the surface cylindrical decomposition is extended inward to produce a solid cylindrical decomposition of the volume; the hexahedral meshing is generated for each volumetric cylinder and then glued together to form a globally consistent hex-mesh.The method is rigorous, geometric, automatic and conformal to the geometry. This work focuses on the theoretic aspects of the framework, the algorithmic details and practical evaluations will be given in the future expositions.