This lecture reviews the state of the art in quadrilateral and hexahedral mesh generation. Three lines of development – block decomposition, superposition and the dual method – are described. The refinement problem is discussed, and methods for octree-based meshing are presented.

One of the key factors for obtaining accurate and reliable results using the Finite Element Method (FEM) is the discretization of the domain. Traditionally, two main types of elements are used for three-dimensional mesh generation: tetrahedral and hexahedral elements. Tetrahedral meshes are automatically generated but standard displacement-based tetrahedral elements generally suffer from perfor...

The medial axis transform provides an alternative representation of geometric models that has many useful properties for analysis modelling. Applications include decomposition of general solids into subregions for mapped meshing, identification of slender regions for dimensional reduction and recognition of small features for suppression. A set of operations for idealisation of the analysis dom...

This paper presents a method to mesh a geographical area in regard to oceanographic data locations. The meshing is achieved using Kohonen's networks. The idea is to adapt the position of the nodes (neurons) by successively considering the location of each data and moving the closest node and its neighbours toward this location. We have successfully tested this method on an hydrological database...

Periodical impulse component is one of typical fault characteristics in vibration signals from rotating machinery. However, this component is very small in the early stage of the fault and masked by various noises such as gear meshing components modulated by shaft frequency, which make it difficult to extract accurately for fault detection. The adaptive line enhancer (ALE) is an effective techn...

The Immersive Topology Environment for Meshing (ITEM) is a wizardlike environment, built on top of the CUBIT Geometry and Meshing Toolkit. ITEM is focused on three main objectives: 1) guiding the user through the simulation model preparation workflow; 2) providing the user with intelligent options based upon the current state of the model; and 3) where appropriate, automating as much of the pro...

Manual surface reconstruction is still an everyday practice in applications involving complex irregular domains necessary for modeling biological systems. Rapid development of biomedical imaging and simulation, however, requires automatic computations involving frequent re-meshing of (r)evolving domains that human-driven generation can simply no longer deliver. This bottleneck hinders the devel...

Using only simple stimuli from the local environment to coordinate the activity of the group, social insects such as termites build highly complex structures. This was discovered by Grassé [1] and is known as stigmergy . We employ such a distributed approach for meshing finite element domains. In two dimensions, a triangular mesh is a discretization of a domain into a set of approximately equil...

Surface triangular meshing plays an important role in the areas of computer graphics and engineering analysis. Traditionally, surface meshing is achieved by mapping meshes created in 2D parametric space onto surfaces. Care is taken in generating meshes in the parametric space and mapping them to surfaces because the transformation of geometry from the parameter space to the real space could be ...