Adaptive tetrahedral subdivision for finite element analysis

Realistic behavior of deformable objects is essential for many applications in computer graphics, engineering, or medicine. Typical techniques are either based on mass-springdamper models, boundary element methods, finite difference methods, or finite element methods. These methods either lack accuracy or are computationally very expensive. If accuracy is required FEM computations use adaptive refinement, where regions with high gradients are refined locally. The bottleneck of this approach is still the gap between CAD and CAE representations. We present an approach to utilize solid subdivision for finite element simulations using an adaptive tetrahedral subdivision scheme based on √ 3 subdivision for triangular meshes. The advantage of this approach is the use of the subdivision representation the modeling, the visualization and the simulation of the solid model.