Components of a Generic, Extensible Meshing Toolkit

Carl Ollivier-Gooch

Abstract

At high levels, Delaunay insertion, advancing front, and oct/quadtree-based unstructured mesh generation methods are vastly different. However, these approaches share many common low-level data structures and operations. In my talk, I will describe the infrastructure design goals of the GRUMMP package.

GRUMMP's data structures are designed to allow extensibility to mixed-element meshing (the first `M' in GRUMMP). This goal implies that cell and face data structures must have both general and specific instances. I will discuss the pros and cons of this design at all levels in the data structure heirarchy.

Low level meshing operations include vertex insertion, proximity checking, vertex smoothing, local mesh reconnection, input/output, and interaction with boundary data; I will focus on the last two of these. GRUMMP uses a flexible system which currently allows I/O in essentially any ASCII file format. Interaction with boundary data is critical for meshing from curved boundaries; GRUMMP uses a generic geometric interface to isolate the mesher from the geometry, to the extent that the mesher does not even need to know the type of geometry data associated with a particular patch.

This material is based upon work supported by National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0122581.
Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the
National Science Foundation