ROBUST AND EFFICIENT CARTESIAN MESH GENERATION FOR COMPONENT-BASED GEOMETRY

This work documents a new method for rapid and robust Cartesian mesh g eneration for component-based geometry. The new algorithm adopts a nov el strategy that first intersects the components to extract the wetted surface before proceeding with volume mesh generation in a second pha se. The intersection scheme is based on a robust geometry engine that uses adaptive precision arithmetic and automatically and consistently handles geometric degeneracies with an algorithmic tie-breaking routin e. The intersection procedure has worst-case computational complexity of O(N log N) and is demonstrated on test cases with up to 121 overlap ping and intersecting components, including a variety of geometric deg eneracies. The volume mesh generation takes the intersected surface tr iangulation as input and generates the mesh through cell division of a n initially uniform coarse grid. In refining hexagonal cells to resolv e the geometry, the new approach preserves the ability to directionall y divide cells that are well aligned with local geometry. The mesh gen eration scheme has linear asymptotic complexity with memory requiremen ts that total approximately 14-17 words/cell. The mesh generation spee d is approximately 10(6) cells/minute on a typical engineering worksta tion.