Improving Element-Boundary Alignment in All-Hex Meshes of Thin-Walled Solids by Side-Face Identification

This paper presents a new computational method for identifying side faces of thin-walled solids that can be excluded from the first step of conformal transformation from a tet mesh to an all-hex mesh. By excluding such side faces, all-hex meshes created by the conformal transformation method better align with the boundary of the side faces and tend to exhibit better scaled Jacobian quality. The proposed method first finds seeds of the candidate faces that may belong to the side faces. Then the candidate faces are grown across edges that have a low dihedral angle. Finally the candidate faces are retracted until no edge between a candidate face and non-candidate face has a low dihedral angle. Experimental results demonstrate clearly improvement of the element-boundary alignment and scaled Jacobian quality.