Booleans of triangulated solids by a boundary conforming tetrahedral mesh generation approach

A new algorithm is proposed to recast Boolean operations of triangulated solids as a boundary conforming tetrahedral meshing problem. Different from those existing algorithms that merely maintain a conforming surface mesh, the new algorithm maintains a boundary conforming volume mesh at the same time of computing surface intersections. This volume mesh not only provides a background structure in helping the improvement of the efficiency of intersection computations, but also enables the development of a set of efficient and reliable flood-filling type procedures to extract the Boolean outputs. The efficiency and robustness of the proposed algorithm are investigated in further details, and various techniques are suggested to tackle these two issues accordingly. Finally, the performance of the proposed algorithm has been evaluated by performing suitable test cases and the results are compared well with those data obtained by other state-of-the-art codes. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.