Adaptive and quality quadrilateral/hexahedral meshing from volumetric data Original Research Article

This paper describes an algorithm to extract adaptive and quality quadrilateral/hexahedral meshes directly from volumetric data. First, a bottom-up surface topology preserving octree-based algorithm is applied to select a starting octree level. Then the dual contouring method is used to extract a preliminary uniform quad/hex mesh, which is decomposed into finer quads/hexes adaptively without introducing any hanging nodes. The positions of all boundary vertices are recalculated to approximate the boundary surface more accurately. Mesh adaptivity can be controlled by a feature sensitive error function, the regions that users are interested in, or finite element calculation results. Finally, a relaxation based technique is deployed to improve mesh quality. Several demonstration examples are provided from a wide variety of application domains. Some extracted meshes have been extensively used in finite element simulations.