Extracting Geometrically Continuous Isosurfaces from Adaptive Mesh Refinement Data
David Fang, Gunther H. Weber, Hank Childs, Eric Brugger, Bernd Hamann, Ken Joy · eScholarship (California Digital Library) · 2004
We present a method for avoiding cracks in isosurfaces extracted from adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) data. By combining several rectilinear grids of different resolution, AMR methods substantially reduce storage and computation requirements to accurately represent and simulate complicated data and phenomena. AMR data consist of grids of different resolution. As a result discontinuities ("hanging nodes") arise in dependent field variables at the interfaces of different-resolution mesh elements. These discontinuities can result in "cracks" in isosurfaces extracted for a specific value of a dependent scalar variable. We describe a method for creating "transition regions" between grids of different resolution. These regions are composed of pyramid elements that allow us to avoid crack formation during isosurface extraction.