Bodies can be triangulated in ADINA using either an advancing front or a Delaunay mesher.

Advancing Front

• A standard advancing front methodology is applied in 3D space.
• Sizes are controlled by an octree.
• Elements are created considering a minimum quality threshold, which can be repeatedly relaxed if the algorithm does not converge.
• There is no optimization nor smoothing applied to the obtained mesh.

Delaunay

• A standard 3D Delaunay insertion algorithm is applied in 3D space.
• It is assumed the input surface mesh given to the mesher is not to be modified, meaning, a strong boundary recovery scheme is employed.
• Sizes are controlled using interpolation on the current mesh.
• Resulting mesh is optimized and smoothed.

Remarks

• The advancing front mesher is relatively slow and lacks robustness for complicated geometries. It however creates high quality meshes when it converges easily.
• The Delaunay mesher is robust and relatively fast.
• The Delaunay mesher is ADINA's default mesher because of its robustness. It also supports anisotropic mesh generation and mesh adaptation.
• Both 3D meshers can be used with either the advancing front or Delaunay surface mesher.

Timings

It is of interest to compare the speeds of the advancing front and Delaunay meshers, and to have an idea of their generation rates. The following tables give numbers of elements generated, CPU times in seconds, and element generation rates per second on an SGI octane for diverse test cases. Note that, for reference, a Pentium II 350 Mhz is about 1.2 times slower than a SGI octane for this type of problems. Each table is preceded by a picture of the input surface mesh. Please click on thumbnail for larger image.

This is a very simple model with a large interior.

This is a simple model with a large interior.

This is a model with some small features and little interior.

This is a model with many small features and little interior. It could not be meshed with the advancing front method.

Image Gallery

The following images show some meshes obtained with the Delaunay mesher. Please click on thumbnails for larger images.

Other ADINA Mesh Generation Features: