High-order curvilinear mesh generation from third-party meshes

K. S. Kirilov, J. Zhou, J. Peiró, D. Moxey

Comput. Aided Design, vol. 191, pp. 103962 (2026)

@article{kirilov-2025a,
  title = {High-order curvilinear mesh generation from third-party meshes},
  author = {Kirilov, K. S. and Zhou, J. and Peir\'o, J. and Moxey, D.},
  year = {2026},
  pages = {103962},
  volume = {191},
  journal = cad,
  doi = {10.1016/j.cad.2025.103962},
  url = {https://davidmoxey.uk/assets/pubs/2026-third-party-meshes.pdf},
  abstract = {Established {\em a posteriori} mesh generation, high-order mesh curving and some mesh optimization approaches often rely on an accurate CAD parametrization of the boundary of the computational domain.  This information, however, is not always available, especially when composite multi-software workflows are employed.  To deal with such cases, we propose a method for reconstructing the missing connectivity information between the mesh and the CAD geometry when importing an arbitrarily sourced mesh. The reconstruction is followed by curving methods for order elevation, projections or subsequently optimisations with boundary-conforming node sliding. Lastly, mesh modification techniques are used to achieve the desired mesh resolution and quality for meshes incorporating boundary layers. We illustrate the steps of the proposed end-to-end workflow through two simple geometries coming from different sources and an end-to-end complex automotive mesh generation test case.}
}

Curving and optimising an imported mesh normally relies on an accurate CAD description of the domain boundary, which is often missing when the mesh comes from other software. This paper reconstructs the link between mesh and geometry, then curves, optimises and refines the result, including meshes with boundary layers.