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Parallel generation of unstructured surface grids

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Abstract

In this paper, a new grid generation system is presented for the parallel generation of unstructured triangular surface grids. The object-oriented design and implementation of the system, the internal components and the parallel meshing process itself are described. Initially in a rasterisation stage, the geometry to be meshed is analysed and a smooth distribution of local element sizes in 3-D space is set up automatically and stored in a Cartesian mesh. This background mesh is used by the advancing front surface mesher as spacing definition for the triangle generation. Both the rasterisation and the meshing are MPI-parallelised. The underlying principles and strategies will be outlined together with the advantages and limitations of the approach. The paper will be concluded with examples demonstrating the capabilities of the presented approach.

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Notes

  1. Single and multiple inheritance, templates, abstract classes and interfaces, strong type checks, streams, exceptions, the standard template library (STL), ....

  2. The geometry was imported depending on the CAD database.

  3. An OO library developed by the first author for the MPI-parallel handling of hybrid unstructured meshes including partitioning, decomposition, communication, etc.

  4. Duplicated elements in the overlap area of a partition owned from another process.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank EADS Military Aircraft, Ottobrunn, and all colleagues in the numerical simulation department for the support. Special acknowledgements have to be given to Luciano Fornasier, Stephan M. Hitze l, Kaare A. Sørensen and Herbert Rieger for the great support concerning different topics of this work.

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Correspondence to Udo Tremel.

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Tremel, U., Deister, F., Hassan, O. et al. Parallel generation of unstructured surface grids. Engineering with Computers 21, 36–46 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00366-005-0311-0

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