Second-order accurate normal reconstruction from volume fractions on unstructured meshes with arbitrary polyhedral cells

Abstract

This paper introduces a novel method for the computation of accurate normal fields from volume fractions on unstructured polyhedral meshes. For surfaces of considerable curvature variation, the method is second-order accurate with respect to symmetric volume differences and first-order accurate with respect to normal field angular deviation. For this purpose, an averaged normal is locally computed, i.e. in each mesh cell, by fitting a plane in a least squares sense with appropriate weights to the volume fraction data of neighbouring cells while explicitly accounting for volume conservation in the cell at hand. The resulting minimization problem is solved approximately by means of a Newton-type method. Moreover, employing the Reynolds transport theorem allows for both assessing the regularity of the derivatives of the least squares error functional with respect to the free parameters and to exactly compute these derivatives at small additional costs. Since the divergence theorem implies that the volume fraction can be written as a sum of face-based quantities, our method considerably simplifies the numerical procedure for applications in three spatial dimensions while demonstrating an inherent ability to robustly deal with unstructured meshes.We discuss the theoretical foundations, regularity and appropriate error measures, along with the details of the numerical algorithm. Finally, numerical results for convex and non-convex hypersurfaces embedded in cuboidal and tetrahedral meshes are presented together with a convergence study considering two different error measures. Moreover, our findings are complemented by profound insights into the minimization procedure.