Adaptive remeshing process with quadrangular finite elements

Since the quality of FEM analysis directly depends on the quality of meshes, various mesh adaptation schemes have been researched. There are two stages on adaptive finite element analysis; to derive error measure and to control meshes based on error measure. The former has been well researched among applied mathematicians. However, the importance of the latter aspect wasn't considered enough. Even if the error measures were well estimated, the total performance of mesh adaptation might be poor with a poor mesh control. This paper proposes an effective mesh control scheme for h-adaptation, or adaptive remeshing scheme with the explicit relation between interpolation theory based on error measure and desirable mesh size. Total mesh adaptation is controlled by introducing Quality Index, or the ratio between the total error norm and the total energy norm which represents the quality of the total meshes; specifying the desirable value of Quality Index, then the adaptive remeshing process can handle it and Quality Index is almost converged to the given value. Since the full automatic feature of the mesh generator is a prerequisite for adaptive remeshing, the author also discusses the algorithm of the quadrangular mesh generator for arbitrary domains. After evaluation on a linear problem, it's confirmed that the proposed mesh control scheme and the proposed error measure-mesh size relations are acceptable. The incompatible case for mesh adaptation is also discussed in this paper.