Triangular Surface Meshing
Surfaces can be triangulated in ADINA using either an advancing front or a Delaunay surface mesher.
Advancing Front
- A standard 2D advancing front algorithm is applied in parameter space.
- Actual distances are obtained from the surface first fundamental form.
- Sizes are controlled by a quadtree built in parameter space.
- Elements are created considering a minimum quality threshold, which can be repeatedly relaxed if the algorithm does not converge.
- There is no optimization or smoothing applied to the obtained mesh.
Delaunay
- A standard 2D Delaunay insertion algorithm is applied in parameter space.
- Sizes are controlled using interpolation on the current mesh.
- Resulting mesh is optimized and smoothed.
Remarks
- The advancing front surface mesher is fast, robust (in its ability to generate a mesh for a given surface), and it creates high quality meshes.
- The Delaunay mesher is probably more robust (in the rare cases the advancing front mesher fails to produce a mesh) but is, at the time being, slower (see timings below). This is not of high concern since the time required to mesh surfaces still represents a small percentage of the total time to mesh a body.
- The Delaunay methodology is employed mostly for special purposes like quadrilateral meshing, anisotropic meshing, curvature-based refinement, and mesh adaptation.
Image Gallery
Figure 1 Mechanical part (advancing front)
Figure 2 Mechanical part (Delaunay)
Figure 3 Turbine impeller (advancing front)
Figure 4 Turbine impeller (Delaunay)
See also the following meshing methods in ADINA: