Volume preserving mesh parameterization based on optimal mass transportation

In order to convert a finite element mesh model to the spline representation for the purpose of isogeometric analysis, one needs to parameterize the solid. This work introduces a novel volumetric parameterization method, which guarantees to be free of volume distortion.Given a simply connected tetrahedral mesh with a single boundary surface, we first compute a harmonic map from the boundary triangle mesh to the unit sphere by non-linear heat diffusion method; then we use the surface harmonic map as the boundary condition to compute the volumetric harmonic map to parameterize the solid onto the unit solid ball; finally we compute an optimal mass transportation map from the unit solid ball with the push-forward volume element induced by the harmonic map onto itself with the Euclidean volume element. The composition of the volumetric harmonic map and the optimal mass transportation map gives an volume-preserving parameterization.The method has solid theoretic foundation, and is based on conventional algorithms in computational geometry, easy to implement. We have thoroughly tested our algorithm on many solid models in reality. The experimental results demonstrate the efficiency and efficacy of the proposed method. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first work addressing volume-preserving parameterization in the literature.     

All-hexahedral mesh generation via inside-out advancing front based on harmonic fields

The generation of hexahedral meshes is an open problem that has undergone significant research. This paper deals with a novel inside-out advancing front method to generate unstructured all-hexahedral meshes for given volumes. Two orthogonal harmonic fields, principal and radial harmonic fields, are generated to guide the inside-out advancing front process based on a few user interactions. Starting from an initial hexahedral mesh inside the given volume, we advance the boundary quadrilateral mesh along the streamlines of radial field and construct layers of hexahedral elements. To ensure high quality and uniform size of the hexahedral mesh, quadrilateral elements are decomposed in such a way that no non-hexahedral element is produced. For complex volume with branch structures, we segment the complex volume into simple sub-volumes that are suitable for our method. Experimental results show that our method generates high quality all-hexahedral meshes for the given volumes.     

Hexahedral Mesh Generation by Successive Dual Cycle Elimination

We propose a new method for constructing all-hexahedral finite element meshes. The core of our method is to build up a compatible combinatorial cell complex of hexahedra for a solid body which is topologically a ball, and for which a quadrilateral surface mesh of a certain structure is prescribed. The step-wise creation of the hex complex is guided by the cycle structure of the combinatorial dual of the surface mesh. Our method transforms the graph of the surface mesh iteratively by changing the dual cycle structure until we get the surface mesh of a single hexahedron. Starting with a single hexahedron and reversing the order of the graph transformations, each transformation step can be interpreted as adding one or more hexahedra to the so far created hex complex. Given an arbitrary solid body, we first decompose it into simpler subdomains equivalent to topological balls by adding virtual 2-manifolds. Secondly, we determine a compatible quadrilateral surface mesh for all subdomains created. Then, in the main part we can use the core routine to build up a hex complex for each subdomain independently. The embedding and smoothing of the combinatorial mesh(es) finishes the mesh generation process. First results obtained for complex geometries are encouraging.     

基于黎曼度量参数曲面四边形网格生成方法及UG 实现

论文给出了基于黎曼度量的参数曲面网格生成的改进铺砖算法。阐述了曲 面自身的黎曼度量,并且运用黎曼度量计算二维参数域上单元节点的位置,从而使映射到三 维物理空间的四边形网格形状良好。文中对原有铺砖法相交处理进行了改进,在运用铺砖法 的同时调用UG-NX 强大的二次开发库函数获取相应的信息,直接在UG-NX 模型的表面生 成四边形网格。算例表明,该法能在曲面上生成质量好的网格。     

Semi-analytical Solid Boundary Conditions for Free Surface Flows

The treatment of solid boundary conditions remains one of the most challenging parts in the SPH method. We present a semi-analytical approach to handle complex solid boundaries of arbitrary shape. Instead of calculating a renormalizing factor for the particle near the boundary, we propose to calculate the volume integral inside the solid boundary under the local spherical frame of a particle. By converting the volume integral into a surface integral, a computer aided design (CAD) mesh file representing the boundary can be naturally integrated for particle simulations. To accelerate the search for a particle's neighboring triangles, a uniform grid is applied to store indices of intersecting triangles. The new semi-analytical solid boundary handling approach is integrated into a position-based method [MM13] as well as a projection-based [HWW*20] to demonstrate its effectiveness in handling complex boundaries. Experiments show that our method is able to achieve comparable results with those simulated using ghost particles. In addition, since our method requires no boundary particles for deforming surfaces, our method is flexible enough to handle complex solid boundaries, including sharp corners and shells.     

Simple and effective variational optimization of surface and volume triangulations

Optimizing surface and volume triangulations is critical for many advanced numerical simulation applications. We present a variational approach for smoothing triangulated surface and volume meshes to improve their overall mesh qualities. Our method seeks to reduce the discrepancies between the actual elements and ideal reference elements by minimizing two energy functions based on conformal and isometric mappings. We derive simple, closed-form formulas for the values, gradients, and Hessians of these energy functions, which reveal important connections of our method with some well-known concepts and methods in mesh generation and surface parameterization. We then introduce a simple and efficient iterative algorithm for minimizing the energy functions, including a novel asynchronous step-size control scheme. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method experimentally and compare it against Laplacian smoothing and some other mesh smoothing techniques.     

从表面重构的体数据实现三维网格剖分

针对有限元分析中网格最优化问题,本文提出一种改进的生成四面体网格的自组织算法。该算法首先应用几何方法将三角形表面模型重新构造成规定大小的分类体数据,同时由该表面模型建立平衡八叉树,计算用以控制网格尺寸的三维数组;然后将体数据转换成邻域内不同等值面的形态一致的边界指示数组;结合改进的自组织算法和相关三维数据的插值函数,达到生成四面体网格的目的。实验对比表明,该方法能够生成更高比例的优质四面体,同时很好地保证了边界的一致。在对封闭的三维表面网格进行有限元建模时,本文算法为其提供了一种有效、可靠的途径。     

NETGEN An advancing front 2D/3D-mesh generator based on abstract rules

In this paper, the algorithms of the automatic mesh generator NETGEN are described. The domain is provided by a Constructive Solid Geometry (CSG). The whole task of 3D mesh generation splits into four subproblems of special point calculation, edge following, surface meshing and finally volume mesh generation. Surface and volume mesh generation are based on the advancing front method. Emphasis is given to the abstract structure of the element generation rules. Several techniques of mesh optimization are tested and quality plots are presented. Received: 11 December 1996 / Accepted: 21 February 1997     

Variational sphere set approximation for solid objects

We approximate a solid object represented as a triangle mesh by a bounding set of spheres having minimal summed volume outside the object. We show how outside volume for a single sphere can be computed using a simple integration over the object’s triangles. We then minimize the total outside volume over all spheres in the set using a variant of iterative Lloyd clustering that splits the mesh points into sets and bounds each with an outside volume-minimizing sphere. The resulting sphere sets are tighter than those of previous methods. In experiments comparing against a state-of-the-art alternative (adaptive medial axis), our method often requires half as many spheres, or fewer, to obtain the same error, under a variety of error metrics including total outside volume, shadowing fidelity, and proximity measurement.     

Adaptive generation of hexahedral element mesh using an improved grid-based method

An improved grid-based algorithm for the adaptive generation of hexahedral finite element mesh is presented in this paper. It is named as the inside-out grid-based method and involves the following four steps. The first step is the generation of an initial grid structure which envelopes the analyzed solid model completely. And the elements size and density maps are constructed based on the surface curvature and local thickness of the solid model. Secondly, the core mesh is generated through removing all the undesired elements using even and odd parity rules. The third step is to magnify the core mesh in an inside-out manner through a surface node projection process using the closest position approach. To match the mesh to the characteristic boundary of the solid model, a minimal Scaled Jacobian criterion is employed. Finally, in order to handle the degenerated elements and improve the quality of the resulting mesh, two comprehensive techniques are employed: the insertion technique and collapsing technique. The present method was applied in the mesh construction of different engineering problems. Scaled Jacobian and Skew metrics are used to evaluate the hexahedral element mesh quality. The application results show that all-hexahedral element meshes which are well-shaped and capture all the geometric features of the original solid models can be generated using the inside-out grid-based method presented in this paper.     

Automatic hexahedral mesh generation for multi-domain composite models using a hybrid projective grid-based method

This paper presents an algorithm to generate an all-hexahedral mesh of a multi-domain solid model using a hybrid grid-based approach. This is based on a projective concept during the boundary adaptation of the initial mesh. In general, the algorithm involves the generation of a grid structure, which is superimposed on the solid model. This grid structure forms an initial mesh consisting of hexahedral elements, which intersect fully or partially with the solid model. This initial mesh is then shrunk in an outside-in manner to the faces of the model through a node projection process using the closest position approach. To match the resulting mesh to the edges of the model, a minimal deformation angle method is used. Finally, to match the vertices with the nodes on the mesh, a minimal warp angle method is employed. To create the mesh of a multi-domain solid model, an outside-in and inside-in hybrid of the grid-based method is used. This hybrid method ensures that the meshes of the different domains are conforming at their common boundary. This paper also describes two methods for resolving cases of degenerate elements: a splitting technique and a wedge insertion technique.     

Direct Reconstruction of a Displaced Subdivision Surface from Unorganized Points

In this paper we describe the generation of a displaced subdivision surface directly from a set of unorganized points. The displaced subdivision surface is an efficient mesh representation that defines a detailed mesh with a displacement map over a smooth domain surface and has many benefits including compression, rendering, and animation, which overcome limitations of an irregular mesh produced by an ordinary mesh reconstruction scheme. Unlike previous displaced subdivision surface reconstruction methods, our method does not rely on a highly detailed reconstructed mesh. Instead, we efficiently create a coarse base mesh, which is used to sample displacements directly from unorganized points, and this results in a simple process and fast calculation. We suggest a shrink-wrapping-like shape approximation and a point-based mesh simplification method that uses the distance between a set of points and a mesh as an error metric to generate a domain surface that optimally approximates the given points. We avoid time-consuming energy minimization by employing a local subdivision surface fitting scheme. Finally, we show several reconstruction results that demonstrate the usability of our algorithm.     

A new feature-preserving mesh-smoothing algorithm

We present a novel mesh denoising and smoothing method in this paper. Our approach starts by estimating the principal curvatures and mesh saliency value for each vertex. Then, we calculate the uniform principal curvature of each vertex based on the weighted average of local principal curvatures. After that, we use the weighted bi-quadratic Bézier surface to fit the neighborhood of each vertex using the least-square method and obtain the new vertex position by adjusting the parameters of the fitting surface. Experiments show that our smoothing method preserves the geometric feature of the original mesh model efficiently. Our approach also prevents the volume shrinkage of the input mesh and obtains smooth boundaries for non-closed mesh models.     

Robust mesh editing using Laplacian coordinates

Shape deformation and editing are important for animation and game design. Laplacian surface based methods have been widely investigated and used in many works. In this paper we propose a robust mesh editing framework which improves traditional Laplacian surface editing. It consists of two procedures: skeleton based as-rigid-as-possible (ARAP) shape modeling and detail-preserving mesh optimization. Traditional ARAP shape modeling relies on the mesh quality. Degenerated mesh may adversely affect the deformation performance. A preprocessing step of mesh optimization can alleviate this problem. However, skinny triangles can still be generated during deformation, which adversely affect the editing performance. Thus our method performs Laplacian mesh deformation and optimization alternately in each iteration, which ensures mesh quality without noticeably increasing computational complexity or changing the shape details. This approach is more robust than those solely using Laplacian mesh deformation. An additional benefit is that the skeleton-based ARAP modeling can approximately preserve the volume of an object with large-scale deformations. The volume is roughly kept by leveraging the skeleton information and employing a carefully designed energy function to preserve the edge length. This method does not break the manifoldness of traditional ARAP methods or sacrifice speed. In our experiments, we show that (1) our method is robust even for degenerated meshes, (2) the deformation is natural in terms of recovering rotations, and (3) volumes are roughly kept even under large-scale deformations. The system achieves real time performance for surface meshes with 7k vertices.     

三维实体有限元自适应网格规划生成

为实现三维实体有限元网格自适应生成,设计了中心点、沿指定曲线和基于实体表面等网格加密生成方式;并根据分析对象几何特征和物理特性经验估计,以规划的方式构造自适应网格单元尺寸信息场．在此基础上,提出基于Delaunay剖分的动态节点单元一体化算法,生成几何特征和物理特性整体自适应的有限元网格．     

A virtual test facility for the efficient simulation of solid material response under strong shock and detonation wave loading

A virtual test facility (VTF) for studying the three-dimensional dynamic response of solid materials subject to strong shock and detonation waves has been constructed as part of the research program of the Center for Simulating the Dynamic Response of Materials at the California Institute of Technology. The compressible fluid flow is simulated with a Cartesian finite volume method and treating the solid as an embedded moving body, while a Lagrangian finite element scheme is employed to describe the structural response to the hydrodynamic pressure loading. A temporal splitting method is applied to update the position and velocity of the boundary between time steps. The boundary is represented implicitly in the fluid solver with a level set function that is constructed on-the-fly from the unstructured solid surface mesh. Block-structured mesh adaptation with time step refinement in the fluid allows for the efficient consideration of disparate fluid and solid time scales. We detail the design of the employed object-oriented mesh refinement framework AMROC and outline its effective extension for fluid–structure interaction problems. Further, we describe the parallelization of the most important algorithmic components for distributed memory machines and discuss the applied partitioning strategies. As computational examples for typical VTF applications, we present the dynamic deformation of a tantalum cylinder due to the detonation of an interior solid explosive and the impact of an explosion-induced shock wave on a multi-material soft tissue body.     

Generation of 3D mixed element meshes using a flexible refinement approach

This paper describes and discusses the main characteristics and implementation issues of a 3D mixed element mesh generator based on a generalization of the modified octree approach. This mesh generator uses primitive elements of different type as internal nodes, a flexible refinement approach as refinement strategy (primitive elements are not always bisected), and bricks, pyramids, prisms and tetrahedra as final elements. The mesh generation process is divided in several steps: the generation of the initial mesh composed of primitive elements, the refinement of primitive elements until the point density requirements are fulfilled, the generation of a graded mesh between dense and coarse regions, and finally, the recognition of the final elements. The main algorithms and data structures are described in detail for each step of the mesh generation process. As result, examples of meshes that satisfy the Delaunay condition and that can be used with the control volume method are shown.     

多源多目标扫掠体的全六面体网格自动生成算法

为实现多源多目标扫掠体六面体网格生成,提出针对该类形体的全六面体网格自动生成算法.该算法结合虚面和虚拟分解算法,将多源多目标扫掠体自动分解为多个多源扫掠子体;再采用多源扫掠网格生成方法生成各子体网格,整体网格则由各子体网格自动组合而成.文中给出了完整的虚拟分解算法,在虚拟分解流程中的"压印"环节利用改进的边界约束Delaunay三角化方法统一处理各类情形,避免了传统算法复杂的分类讨论.最后给出多个网格实例及其网格质量数据,验证了文中算法的实用性.     

计算三维体积的四边形等参元方法

通过对三维有界区域的边界曲面作四边形网格剖分,用有限元方法处理高斯公式中的曲面积分,由等参变换及双线性插值导出任意四边形单元上曲面积分的数值求积公式．分析求积公式中三阶行列式意义,提出了简单五面体有向体积概念,推导出计算四边形网面所围立体的有向体积叠加方法．数值试验表明该方法对光滑边界三维体积计算有很好的数值逼近．