Extending the range of applicability and automation of the advancing front grid generation technique
Rainald Loehner · 34th Aerospace Sciences Meeting and Exhibit · 1996
We describe recent extensions and improvements to the advancing front grid generation technique. The following areas are treated: situations with thin or crossing surfaces, meshing of surfaces defined by triangulations, ease of user input to define the desired element size in space, and self-adaptive surface meshing to specified accuracy. The first extension is important if one considers the generation of volumetric grids around shells, membranes, fabrics, or CAD-data that exhibit cusps. Traditional advancing front generators are likely to fail in these situations. The second extension is required for situations where the surfaces to be gridded are not defined analytically, but via a triangulation. The third topic deals with the reduction of manual labor to specify element size in space. Sources, element sizes attached directly to CAD-data, and adaptive background grids are discussed. Adaptive background grids, in combination with surface deviation tolerances, are used to obtain surface triangulations that represent the geometry faithfully, and at the same time enable a smooth transition to volumetric meshes.