All-hexahedral element meshing: Generation of the dual mesh by recurrent subdivision

The domain geometry is defined by means of a closed all-quadrilateral mesh. The outer mesh imposes very strong restrictions on the possible connectivities between the inner hexahedral elements. Following the guidelines of the outer topology, the inner one is almost entirely defined. Several ways may be decided for certain configurations, some of them requiring special considerations in order to achieve a valid FEM mesh. The process is entirely performed by constructing the (graph theoretical) dual of the hexahedral mesh, this means no metric information is handled until the final (positioning and smoothing) steps. The essential steps of this scheme are described by means of examples. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science S.A. All rights reserved.