Some aspects of parametric surface meshing

In many computational processes involving the finite element method, the domain to be meshed is defined by a set of contiguous parametric surfaces (this is the case for instance in CAD environments). In this context, the mesh must satisfy two fundamental conditions, namely: approximate the surface as accurately as possible, and contain elements having the highest possible quality. In this paper, definitions are given to measure distance deviations (denoted by A 0 ) and angle deviations ( A 1 ) between the mesh and the exact surface. Also, isotropic or anisotropic sizing functions are specified for generating quality meshes while bounding A 0 and/or A 1 deviations. These size specifications have been tested on many industrial models, and the meshes generated show the pertinency of this approach.