Skip to main content
Log in

Faster and efficient tetrahedral mesh generation using generator neural networks for 2D and 3D geometries

  • Original Article
  • Published:
Neural Computing and Applications Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Simulations are crucial for validating the design of engineering systems and their components. However, before simulations can be performed, the geometry of the component must undergo meshing, which involves dividing it into small elements to solve the Partial Differential Equations that describe the phenomenon being simulated. This process can be computationally expensive, so we propose a meshing algorithm that uses Generator Neural Networks to generate refined meshes. Our algorithm is based on a generator used in a Conditional Generative Adversarial Network, which was trained on reference meshes generated by conventional meshing codes. The proposed scheme generated mesh nodal coordinates for both 2D and 3D geometries, and the difference between the element quality of our meshes and the reference meshes used as training data was only 1%. Our algorithm was also 75% faster than the algorithm used to generate the training data meshes. We demonstrate that refined meshes can be generated without relying on computationally expensive solvers.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Arahira T, Todo M, Myoui A (2021) Fracture analysis of porous bioceramics by finite element method. ICIC Express Lett, Part B: Appl 12(07):619

    Google Scholar 

  2. Zienkiewicz OC, Taylor RL, Zhu JZ (2005) The finite element method: its basis and fundamentals. Elsevier

  3. Ainsworth M, Oden JT (1997) A posteriori error estimation in finite element analysis. Comput Methods Appl Mech Eng 142(1–2):1–88

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  4. Chang-Hoi A, Sang-Soo L, Hyuek-Jae L, Soo-Young L (1991) A self-organizing neural network approach for automatic mesh generation. IEEE Trans Magn 27(5):4201–4204

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Chedid R, Najjar N (1996) Automatic finite-element mesh generation using artificial neural networks-part i: prediction of mesh density. IEEE Trans Magn 32(5):5173–5178

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Manevitz L, Yousef M, Givoli D (1997) Finite-element mesh generation using self-organizing neural networks. Comput-Aided Civil Infrastruct Eng 12(4):233–250

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Nechaeva O (2006) Composite algorithm for adaptive mesh construction based on self-organizing maps. In: International conference on artificial neural networks, pp. 445–454 . Springer

  8. Alfonzetti S, Coco S, Cavalieri S, Malgeri M (1996) Automatic mesh generation by the let-it-grow neural network. IEEE Trans Magn 32(3):1349–1352

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Triantafyllidis DG, Labridis DP (2002) A finite-element mesh generator based on growing neural networks. IEEE Trans Neural Netw 13(6):1482–1496

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Martinetz T, Schulten K (1994) Topology representing networks. Neural Netw 7(3):507–522

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Fritzke B (1995) A growing neural gas network learns topologies. Adv Neural Inf Process Syst 7:625–632

    Google Scholar 

  12. Álvarez R, Noguera J, Tortosa L, Zamora A (2006) Gng3d-a software tool for mesh optimization based on neural networks. In: The 2006 IEEE international joint conference on neural network proceedings, pp. 4005–4012 . IEEE

  13. Vinyals O, Fortunato M, Jaitly N (2015) Pointer networks. arXiv preprint arXiv:1506.03134

  14. Sutskever I, Vinyals O, Le QV (2014) Sequence to sequence learning with neural networks. In: Advances in neural information processing systems, pp. 3104–3112

  15. Kim J, Choi J, Kang W (2020) A data-driven approach for simultaneous mesh untangling and smoothing using pointer networks. IEEE Access 8:70329–70342

    Article  Google Scholar 

  16. Zhang Z, Wang Y, Jimack PK, Wang H (2020) Meshingnet: a new mesh generation method based on deep learning. In: International conference on computational science, pp. 186–198 . Springer

  17. Papagiannopoulos A, Clausen P, Avellan F (2021) How to teach neural networks to mesh: application on 2-d simplicial contours. Neural Netw 136:152–179

    Article  Google Scholar 

  18. Chen X, Li T, Wan Q, He X, Gong C, Pang Y, Liu J (2022) Mgnet: a novel differential mesh generation method based on unsupervised neural networks. Eng Comput 38(5):4409–4421

    Article  Google Scholar 

  19. Chen X, Liu J, Yan J, Wang Z, Gong C (2022) An improved structured mesh generation method based on physics-informed neural networks. arXiv preprint arXiv:2210.09546

  20. Mehendale N, Soman S (2021) Finite element (fe) mesh generation for 2d shapes using multiple long short-term memory networks. Available at SSRN 3968782

  21. Goodfellow I, Bengio Y, Courville A (2016) Deep learning. MIT press

  22. Hornik K, Stinchcombe M, White H (1989) Multilayer feedforward networks are universal approximators. Neural Netw 2(5):359–366

    Article  Google Scholar 

  23. Goodfellow IJ, Shlens J, Szegedy C (2014) Explaining and harnessing adversarial examples. arXiv preprint arXiv:1412.6572

  24. Kushida J-I, Hara A, Takahama T (2020) Generation of adversarial examples using adaptive differential evolution. Int J Innov Comput, Inform Control 16(5):405–414

    Google Scholar 

  25. Radford A, Metz L, Chintala S (2015) Unsupervised representation learning with deep convolutional generative adversarial networks. arXiv preprint arXiv:1511.06434

  26. Persson P-O, Strang G (2004) A simple mesh generator in matlab. SIAM Rev 46(2):329–345

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  27. Strang G (2007) Computational science and engineering. Wellesley-Cambridge Press . https://books.google.co.in/books?id=GQ9pQgAACAAJ

  28. Field DA (2000) Qualitative measures for initial meshes. Int J Numer Meth Eng 47(4):887–906

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

The authors express their gratitude to Rutwik Patel, Vrushali Sule, Dr. Devayani Soman, and Swanand Soman for their review and assistance in formatting the manuscript. The authors are thankful for their valuable feedback and insightful suggestions.

Funding

No funding was involved in the present work.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Contributions

Conceptualization was done by S. Soman (SS) and N. Mehendale (NM). All the literature reading and data gathering were performed by SS. All the experiments and coding were performed by SS. The formal analysis was performed by SS. Manuscript writing—original draft preparation was done by SS. Review and editing were done by NM. Visualization work was carried out by SS and NM.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ninad Mehendale.

Ethics declarations

Conflicts of interest

Authors S. Soman and N. Mehendale declare that there has been no conflict of interest.

Code availability

All the codes have been made available in the supplementary material.

Ethics approval

All authors consciously assure that the manuscript fulfills the following statements: (1) This material is the authors’ own original work, which has not been previously published elsewhere. (2) The paper is not currently being considered for publication elsewhere. (3) The paper reflects the authors’ own research and analysis in a truthful and complete manner. (4) The paper properly credits the meaningful contributions of co-authors and co-researchers. (5) The results are appropriately placed in the context of prior and existing research.

Consent to participate

Informed consent was not required as there were no human participants. All the necessary permissions were obtained from Institute’s Ethical committee and concerned authorities.

Consent for publication

Authors have taken all the necessary consents for publication from participants wherever required.

Additional information

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Supplementary Information

Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.

Supplementary file1 (PDF 36 KB)

Supplementary file1 (MP4 759 KB)

Rights and permissions

Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Soman, S., Mehendale, N. Faster and efficient tetrahedral mesh generation using generator neural networks for 2D and 3D geometries. Neural Comput & Applic 36, 1805–1813 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00521-023-09119-2

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00521-023-09119-2

Keywords

Navigation