Advancing Front Mesh Generation on Dirty Composite Surfaces

Computer-aided design (CAD) models usually contain many errors between neighboring surfaces, such as slivers, gaps, and overlaps. To clean up such models, virtual operations have been suggested to merge multiple neighboring CAD surfaces into a single composite surface. However, it remains a challenge to generate a quality mesh on thereby formed dirty composite surfaces. In this paper, we propose a novel advancing front technique (AFT) that can treat such composite surfaces by developing two new schemes to enhance the traditional AFT. Firstly, for each composite surface, we define a parametric plane by using a combined set of the tessellation on this composite surface. Simplicial complex augmentation framework reparameterization approach is suggested since it can treat tessellations containing gap and overlap after introducing a pre-processing step. Meanwhile, this approach can ensure a bijective mapping between the parametric and physical space. The front intersection check can thus be performed on the parametric plane robustly. Secondly, the indirect and direct approaches are alternatively employed to calculate ideal points in different circumstances. In the circumstance that the possible new element is completely contained in one single CAD surface, the ideal point is calculated on the intrinsic parametric plane of the surface; otherwise, the ideal point is directly calculated on the physical space. We avoid using the geometry defined on the tessellation since we prefer to getting a mesh respecting the original CAD model rather than its tessellation counterpart. Presently, the developed new schemes have been incorporated into our in-house surface mesher, and their efficiency and effectiveness have been demonstrated through a comparison with state-of-the-art commercial tools (e.g., COMSOL Multiphysics) and AFT algorithm, using CAD models of industry-level complexity. •New advancing front method for composite surfaces with CAD errors.•Enhanced SCAF to obtain a parametric plane for robust, efficient front checking.•Combined indirect/direct methods for ideal nodes, balancing efficiency/robustness.•The output mesh respects the original CAD mesh accurately.•Proven efficiency/effectiveness on complex industrial CAD models.