Advancing front quadrilateral surface mesh generation

An advancing front triangular surface mesh generation algorithm is revised for quadrilateral mesh generation.The elements are generated individually in the new algorithm to avoid the robustness problems of the paving algorithm in which the elements are generated row by row.As opposed to the triangular mesh generation algorithm,the technical issues encountered by the quadrilateral one are more complex.This paper discusses the solutions for these issues,and pays more attention on those issues specific for quadrilateral mesh generation.Numerical experiments are presented finally,which demonstrate that the new algorithm could generate quadrilateral meshes for complex surface models automatically,and the quality of the resulting meshes is higher than that produced by one commercial mesh generator.