Hybrid Surface Partitioning of Finite Element Meshes

A hybrid automatic and interactive scheme is developed for partitioning the surfaces of mechanical parts represented by finite element meshes on the basis of geometric discontinuity. Given a finite element surface mesh M in three dimensions, the algorithm firstly finds a partition of M into k subregions k M M ,..., 1 on the basis of 1 G discontinuities in an automatic manner. Secondly, an interactive approach is proposed to decompose surface meshes further w.r.t. 2 G discontinuity in reference to surface curvatures. The overall computational complexity is ) log ( n n O , where n is the maximum between the numbers of elements and vertices in M , respectively. Numerical experiments have been conducted to show the effectiveness of our algorithm and its application in shape morphing or optimization.