Automatic Generation of Well Structured Meshes Using Medial Axis and Surface Subdivision

Abstract This paper reports on a project in which automatic mesh generation is divided into two phases. In the first phase feature recognition and shape grammar techniques, based on the medial axis of a 2D region, are employed to decompose a complex component into a number of simple subregions. In the second phase the subregions are meshed to a controlled density using conventional mapped mesh methods. The advantage of this approach is that good quality meshes of quadrilateral elements can be generated in 2D and, potentially, meshes of hexahedral elements in 3D. A parallel program of work has concentrated on the analysis of errors: different methods for error estimation and for providing transitions in mesh density have been compared.