Anisotropic quadrilateral meshing : an indirect approach

Abstract

In this paper a new indirect approach is presented for anisotropic quadrilateral mesh generation based on discrete surfaces. The ability to generate grids automatically had a pervasive influence on many application areas in particularly on the field of Computational Fluid Dynamics. In spite of considerable advances in automatic grid generation there is still potential for better performance and higher element quality. The aim is to generate meshes with less elements which fit some anisotropy criterion to satisfy numerical accuracy while reducing processing times remarkably. The generation of high quality volume meshes using an advancing front algorithm relies heavily on a well designed surface mesh. For this reason this paper presents a new technique for the generation of high quality surface meshes containing a significantly reduced number of elements. This is achieved by creating quadrilateral meshes that include anisotropic elements along a source of anisotropy.