Automatic Unstructured Element-Sizing Specification Algorithm for Surface Mesh Generation

Automatic and accurate element-sizing specification is crucial for the efficient generation of surface meshes with a reduced number of elements. This study proposes a novel algorithm to fulfill this goal, which is based on the unstructured background mesh, and provides an alternative of existing Cartesian mesh based algorithms. The geometric factors are considered and combined with some user parameters to form an initial size map. This map is then smoothed to a well-graded one. The timing efficiency of the size-query routine is improved to a comparable level with that based on the Cartesian mesh. Finally, the size map produced by the proposed algorithm is used to control the scales of elements generated by an advancing front surface mesher. Meshing experiments of complex computational aerodynamics configurations show that the proposed algorithm only consumes minutes to prepare the size map for the surface mesher; however, a conventional grid sources based scheme may need many hours by a tedious manual interaction process. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.