Receding Front Method: A New Approach Applied to Generate Hexahedral Meshes of Outer Domains

Abstract

Two of the most successful methods to generate unstructured hexahedral meshes are the grid-based methods and the advancing front methods. On the one hand, the grid-based methods generate high quality elements in the inner part of the domain using an inside-outside approach. On the other hand, advancing front methods generate high quality hexahedra near the boundary using an outside-inside approach. In this paper we propose the receding front method, an original approach that combines the advantages of both methodologies: we use an inside-outside mesh generation approach by means of a reversed front advance. We apply this approach to mesh outer domains. To reproduce the shape of the boundaries, we first pre-compute the mesh fronts by combining two solutions of the Eikonal equation on a tetrahedral reference mesh. Then, to generate high quality elements, we expand the quadrilateral surface mesh of the inner body towards the unmeshed external boundary using the pre-computed fronts as a guide. Further research is under way in order to apply the proposed method to more complicated geometries.

This work was partially sponsored by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación under grants DPI2007-62395, BIA2007-66965 and CGL2008-06003-C03-02/CLI and by Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC).