Universal generation of an initial mesh for adaptive 3-D finite element method

A concept is presented which leads to a coarse tetrahedral starting mesh for an adaptive finite element method. The mesh generation is accomplished with little computational effort, using a two-step algorithm for surface and volume decomposition. The method is able to discretize common 3-D geometric regions described by a surface model. Since the 3-D discretization is based on the surface mesh of triangles, the method can easily be applied on a wide variety of geometries