On the adjacencies of triangular meshes based on skeleton-regular partitions

For any 2D triangulation tau, the 1-skeleton mesh of tau is the wireframe mesh defined by the edges of tau, while that for any 3D triangulation tau, the 1-skeleton and the 2-skeleton meshes, respectively, correspond to the wireframe mesh formed by the edges of tau and the "surface" mesh defined by the triangular faces of tau. A skeleton-regular partition of a triangle or a tetrahedra, is a partition that globally applied over each element of a conforming mesh (where the intersection of adjacent elements is a vertex or a common face, or a common edge) produce both a refined conforming mesh and refined and conforming skeleton meshes, Such a partition divides all the edges (and all the faces) of an individual element in the same number of edges (faces). We prove that sequences of meshes constructed by applying a skeleton-regular partition over each element of the preceding mesh have an associated set of difference equations which relate the number of elements, faces, edges and vertices of the nth and (n - 1)th meshes. By using these constitutive difference equations we prove that asymptotically the average number of adjacencies over these meshes (number of triangles by node and number of tetrahedra by vertex) is constant when n goes to infinity. We relate these results with the non-degeneracy properties of longest-edge based partitions in 2D and include empirical results which support the conjecture that analogous results hold in 3D. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.