Direct surface triangulation using stereolithography data

An efficient and user-friendly approach is presented for constructing unstructured surface grids directly on three-dimensional CAD surface data. This system has the following features: 1) use of stereolithography data as surface definitions, that is, background grids for surface meshing; 2) automatic reconstruction of geometric features for initial front setup; 3) graphical user interface for easily controlling surface mesh density by inserting line sources and point sources on the surface; 4) adoption of an advancing-front surface triangulation method, which minimizes the necessity to divide the surface into a number of patches; and 5) outer boundary generation from templates in the system. The resulting system has been applied to several airplane configurations, and a notable reduction in turnaround time has been achieved.