Utilizing Topological Discrete Triangulated Data within SolidMesh

Blades, E. L., Remotigue, M., & Marcum, D. (2007). Utilizing Topological Discrete Triangulated Data within SolidMesh. 10th ISGG Conference on Numerical Grid Generation, Crete, Greece.

SolidMesh is enhanced to generate high-quality unstructured surface meshes on highly resolved triangulated datasets. SolidMesh is a graphical unstructured mesh generation tool that integrates a solid modeling data structure, a parametric geometry description, and Advancing-Front/Local Reconnection algorithms to generate unstructured surface meshes. The faceted data does not have to be high quality. In fact it may be of very poor quality, but it should be of sufficient resolution to represent the original geometry. The primary source of the discrete data is assumed to be watertight and divided into topological surfaces. The discrete data is treated as the underlying geometry when generating the surface mesh. During the surface mesh generation process, a local surface mapping procedure is used that creates a geometric mapping between the underlying discrete data and the surface mesh. Linear interpolation is currently used during the mapping procedure. The capability to generate a mapping on discrete data also provides the ability to group multiple surfaces together for surface mesh generation purposes and is also implemented as part of this work. This capability, referred to as a composite surface, uses a global mapping approach that does not modify the underlying geometric definitions of the individual surfaces, which may be either discrete or geometric Non-Uniform Rational B-Spline (NURBS) surfaces. The final coordinate evaluations are performed exactly as if no composite surface were used. This capability not only reduces the burden of CAD repair and cleanup, but also increases the quality of the unstructured surface mesh by ignoring interior geometric surface boundaries that result in extreme element angles.