A Hybrid Approach to Fast Indirect Quadrilateral Mesh Generation

Published in Numerical Geometry, Grid Generation and Scientific Computing. Lecture Notes in Computational Science and Engineering, vol 143., 2021

Author(s): D. Zint, R. Grosso

Abstract: Indirect quadrilateral mesh generation methods are commonly used particularly for numerical simulations due to their adaptiveness to different element sizes across the domain. The well-known Blossom-Quad algorithm generates high quality meshes but has a worst case complexity of O(N^2 + N log N). A method which merges triangles using topological operations is less complex, indeed we show that it has a complexity of O(N log N), but resulting meshes might have low quality especially near boundaries. We propose a combination of these two methods. Boundary regions are processed by Blossom-Quad and the interior by triangle merging. Post-processing solves quality issues caused by triangle merging. The results are comparable to pure Blossom-Quad but this approach is much faster. Therefore, it is favorable especially on large meshes where the runtime of Blossom-Quad might become troublesome. The efficiency of this hybrid approach is shown on ocean meshes with up to several million triangles.

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