An extended advancing front technique for closed surfaces mesh generation

Abstract

Abstract An extended advancing front technique (AFT) with shift operations and Riemann metric named as shifting‐AFT is presented for finite element mesh generation on 3D surfaces, especially 3D closed surfaces. Riemann metric is used to govern the size and shape of the triangles in the parametric space. The shift operators are employed to insert a floating space between real space and parametric space during the 2D parametric space mesh generation. In the previous work of closed surface mesh generation, the virtual boundaries are adopted when mapping the closed surfaces into 2D open parametric domains. However, it may cause the mesh quality‐worsening problem. In order to overcome this problem, the AFT kernel is combined with the shift operator in this paper. The shifting‐AFT can generate high‐quality meshes and guarantee convergence in both open and closed surfaces. For the shifting‐AFT, it is not necessary to introduce virtual boundaries while meshing a closed surface; hence, the boundary discretization procedure is largely simplified, and moreover, better‐shaped triangles will be generated because there are no additional interior constraints yielded by virtual boundaries. Comparing with direct methods, the shifting‐AFT avoids costly and unstable 3D geometrical computations in the real space. Some examples presented in this paper have demonstrated the advantages of shift‐AFT in 3D surface mesh generation, especially for the closed surfaces. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.