Element-Saving Hexahedral 3-Refinement Templates

TL;DR

This paper presents a new 3-refinement method for conforming hexahedral meshes that balances element quality and grid refinement, reducing over-refinement compared to previous techniques.

Contribution

It introduces a moderately-balanced 3-refinement approach that relaxes strict conditions, enabling efficient conforming hex mesh generation with fewer elements.

Findings

Achieves conforming hex meshes with lower element count

Maintains higher element quality with planar quad faces

Reduces over-refinement compared to previous 3-refinement methods

Abstract

Conforming hexahedral (hex) meshes are favored in simulation for their superior numerical properties, yet automatically decomposing a general 3D volume into a conforming hex mesh remains a formidable challenge. Among existing approaches, methods that construct an adaptive Cartesian grid and subsequently convert it into a conforming mesh stand out for their robustness. However, the topological schemes enabling this conversion require strict compatibility conditions among grid elements, which inevitably refine the initial grid and increase element count. Developing more relaxed conditions to minimize this overhead has been a persistent research focus. State-of-the-art 2-refinement octree methods employ a weakly-balanced condition combined with a generalized pairing condition, using a dual transformation to yield exceptionally low element counts. Yet this approach suffers from critical limitations: information stored on primal cells, such as signed distance fields or triangle index sets, is lost after dualization, and the resulting dual cells often exhibit poor minimum scaled Jacobian (min SJ) with non-planar quadrilateral (quad) faces. Alternatively, 3-refinement 27-tree methods can directly generate conforming hex meshes through template-based replacement of primal cells, producing higher-quality elements with planar quad faces. However, previous 3-refinement techniques impose conditions far more strict than 2-refinement counterparts, severely over-refining grids by factors of ten to one hundred, creating a major bottleneck in simulation pipelines. This article introduces a novel 3-refinement approach that transforms an adaptive 3-refinement grid into a conforming grid using a moderately-balanced condition, slightly stronger than the weakly-balanced condition but substantially more relaxed than prior 3-refinement requirements...... (check PDF for the full abstract)