Adaptive and quality tetrahedral mesh generation

Tetrahedral meshes are being extensively used in finite element methods (FEM). This short paper presents an algorithm to generate adaptive and quality tetrahedral meshes from a triangulated surface mesh model. A top-down octree subdivision is conducted on the surface mesh to construct standard Body Center Cubic (BCC) tetrahedra. A modified marching tetrahedra algorithm is then used to extract the boundary faces of the tetrahedra near the surface mesh, followed by an optimal decomposition of the generated polyhedra into tetrahedra. The quality of the tetrahedral meshes obtained is measured by dihedral angles, which are greater than 6° in all the models we have tested. A user-friendly GUI has been concurrently developed, allowing users to manipulate and visualize the tetrahedral meshes.