Feature-sensitive tetrahedral mesh generation with guaranteed quality

Tetrahedral meshes are being extensively used in finite element methods (FEMs). This paper proposes an algorithm to generate feature-sensitive and high-quality tetrahedral meshes from an arbitrary surface mesh model. A top-down octree subdivision is conducted on the surface mesh and a set of tetrahedra are constructed using adaptive body-centered cubic (BCC) lattices. Special treatments are given to the tetrahedra near the surface such that the quality of the resulting tetrahedral mesh is provably guaranteed: the smallest dihedral angle is always greater than 5.71 degrees. The meshes generated by our method are not only adaptive from the interior to the boundary, but also feature-sensitive on the surface with denser elements in high-curvature regions where geometric features most likely reside. A variety of experimental results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of this algorithm. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.