Automated Conversion of 2D Triangular Mesh into Quadrilateral Mesh with Directionality Control

Proceedings, 7th International Meshing Roundtable, Sandia National Lab, pp.77-86, October 1998

INTERNATIONAL
MESHING
ROUNTABLE

7th International Meshing Roundtable
October 26-28, 1998
Dearborn, Michigan, USA

Takayuki Itoh, Keisuke Inoue, Atsushi Yamada
IBM Research, Tokyo Research Laboratory
Email: { itot, inoue, ayamada }@trl.ibm.co.jp

Kenji Shimada
Carnegie Mellon University, Mechanical Engineering
Email: shimada@cmu.edu

Tomotake Furuhata
IBM Japan, AP Solution Development
Email: furuhata@yamato.ibm.co.jp

Abstract
This paper proposes an automated quadrilateral meshing technique based on the conversion of triangular meshes. Given a triangular mesh and a vector field representing the desired directionality of quadrilateral elements, our new approach generates a well-shaped and well-aligned quadrilateral mesh. In the approach, the values of three scalar functions are first calculated for each pair of adjacent triangular elements. These functions evaluate the following conditions: (1) directionality control, (2) optimization of the shapes of elements, and (3) reduction of the number of isolated triangular elements. Pairs of triangular elements are then converted into quadrilateral elements in order of the sum of the values of the three functions.

Download Full Paper (PDF)