Automatic unstructured surface mesh generation for complex configurations

In this paper a new object-oriented (OO) approach is presented for automatic parallel advancing front based surface mesh generation and adaptive remeshing for complex configurations. Based on the ST++-system the advantages of the OO design and implementation compared to the traditional structural approach are described. Algorithmic enhancements to the advancing front method are explained, enabling a robust NURBS based triangulation process directly on B-rep CAD data. The message passing (MPI) parallelization strategy together with the achievable performance improvements are demonstrated. With the outlined parallel geometry analysis/rasterization a powerful method is described to derive automatically a well suited mesh size specification without any user-interaction from scratch. The application of this method to a complex 'real world' example finishes this paper. Copyright (C) 2004 John Wiley Sons, Ltd.