Balanced octree for tetrahedral mesh generation

Nowadays, with the advances of Finite Element Analysis (FEA) packages, some of the engineering and design problems such as stress or thermal deformation can be successfully solved. These are convenient for better incorporating the design constraints of various tasks such as injection molded parts, or rapid prototyping and tooling. Mesh generation is the major step of finite element method for numerical computation. Common types of mesh include triangulation or tetrahedralization. During the mesh generation process, we always find difficulty in the formation of a uniform, non-conformal mesh. The undesirable mesh will adversely influence the accuracy and meshing time of the model. This paper will, thus, propose an effective approach to extend to three-dimensional (3D) mesh generation by octree balancing method so as to adjust the mesh pattern. In this paper, the implementation of octree balancing will be explained and illustrated with real life example. The proposed method includes three main steps. Problematic unbalanced octants will be detected and Steiner points will be added as appropriate before the tetrahedral mesh generation. The balanced octree will form good tetrahedral meshes for further analysis. Then the balanced and unbalanced meshes will be compared for efficiency and accuracy for mesh generation.