A cost/benefit analysis of simplicial mesh improvement techniques as measured by solution efficiency

The quality of unstructured meshes has long been known to affect both the efficiency and the accuracy of the numerical solution of application problems. Mesh quality can often be improved through the use of algorithms based on local reconnection schemes, node smoothing, and adaptive refinement or coarsening. These methods typically incur a significant cost, and in this paper, we provide an analysis of the tradeoffs associated with the cost of mesh improvement in terms of solution efficiency. We first consider simple finite element applications and show the effect of increasing the number of poor quality elements in the mesh and decreasing their quality on the solution time of a number of different solvers. These simple application problems are theoretically well-understood, and we show the relationship between the quality of the mesh and the eigenvalue spectrum of the resulting linear system. We then consider realistic finite element and finite volume application problems, and show that the cost of mesh improvement is significantly less than the cost of solving the problem on a poorer quality mesh.