Section: New Results

Parallel CAD surface meshing

Participants : P. Laug, H. Borouchaki [correspondant]

A wide range of surfaces can be defined by means of composite parametric surfaces as is the case for most CAD modelers. There are, essentially, two approaches to meshing parametric surfaces: direct and indirect. Popular direct methods include the octree-based method, the advancing-front-based method and the paving-based method working directly in the tridimensional space. The indirect approach consists in meshing the parametric domain and mapping the resulting mesh onto the surface. Using the latter approach, we have proposed a general meshing scheme which consists in discretizing each interface curve and meshing each parametric domain according to the above boundary discretizations. Complex surfaces such as a car engine or a complete aircraft are composed of thousands of patches, and meshing these surfaces using the above sequential scheme can be inefficient. We propose a parallel version of the general meshing scheme while naturally balancing the load to each processor.