“all-hexahedral Element Meshing by Generating the Dual Mesh”

The 3D meshing process begins with the definition of the outer geometry. With a CAD system and a 2d quadrilateral mesh generator, a closed all-quadrilateral mesh is obtained, which is the start point for the process that this communication describes. Once imposed the outer quadrilateral mesh, the connectivity between the inner elements becomes strongly conditioned. 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 managed until the final (positioning and smoothing) steps. The essential steps of this scheme and several examples obtained are described on this