NIBBLE MESHING - INCREMENTAL, TRIANGULATION OF NON-MANIFOLD SOLID BOUNDARY

A computational method. called Nibble algorithm, for triangulation of non-manifold solid boundary is proposed. The algorithm is based on an incremental boundary traversal technique. The mesh generator creates a mesh element-by-element until the whole region is covered no matter t he domain complexity (faces with non-convex shapes and mu:ti-connected boundaries are treated). At each step of the algorithm, a surface bou ndary called cic live boundary is evaluated in such a way that it nibb les the surface to be triangulated. The fundamental feature of this pr ocess is the definition of an area, called influence zone, which contr ols the node insertion and thus avoids edge intersection tests. Furthe r, the generated mesh is refined through an extension of the Laplacian smoothing. It allows an optimization of the smoothing quality without saturating the time complexity. A new technique for adaptive smoothin g is also applied in order to speed up the mesh refinement. (C) 1998 E lsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.