Tetrahedral mesh generation in polyhedral regions based on convex polyhedron decompositions

Abstract

AbstractA method using techniques of computational geometry for generating tetrahedral finite element meshes in three‐dimensional polyhedral regions is presented. The input to the method consists of the boundary faces of the polyhedral region and possibly internal and hole interfaces, plus the desired number of tetrahedra and other scalar parameters. The region is decomposed into convex polyhedra in two stages so that tetrahedra of one length scale can be generated in each subregion. A mesh distribution function, which is either automatically constructed from the first‐stage convex polyhedron decomposition or supplied by the user, is used to determine the tetrahedron sizes in the subregions. Then a boundary‐constrained triangulation is constructed in each convex polyhedron, with local transformations being used to improve the quality of the tetrahedra. Experimental results from triangulations of three regions are provided.