Automatic generation of 3D unstructured high-order curvilinear meshes

M. Turner, D. Moxey, S. J. Sherwin, J. Peiró

Proceedings of the European Congress on Computational Methods in Applied Sciences and Engineering, pp. 428–433 (2016)

@inproceedings{turner-2016a,
  title = {Automatic generation of 3D unstructured high-order curvilinear meshes},
  author = {Turner, M. and Moxey, D. and Sherwin, S. J. and Peir\'o, J.},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the European Congress on Computational Methods in Applied Sciences and Engineering},
  pages = {428--433},
  year = {2016},
  abstract = {The generation of suitable, good quality high-order meshes is a significant obstacle in the academic and industrial uptake of high-order CFD methods. These methods have a number of favourable characteristics such as low dispersion and dissipation and higher levels of numerical accuracy than their low-order counterparts, however the methods are highly susceptible to inaccuracies caused by low quality meshes. These meshes require significant curvature to accuratly describe the geometric surfaces, which presents a number of difficult challenges in their generation. As yet, research into the field has produced a number of interesting technologies that go some way towards achieving this goal, but are yet to provide a complete system that can systematically produce curved high-order meshes for arbitrary geometries for CFD analysis. This paper presents our efforts in that direction and introduces an open-source high-order mesh generator, NekMesh, which has been created to bring high-order meshing technologies into one coherent pipeline which aims to produce 3D high-order curvilinear meshes from CAD geometries in a robust and systematic way.},
  url = {https://davidmoxey.uk/assets/pubs/2016-eccomas.pdf},
  doi = {10.7712/100016.1825.8410}
}

High-order methods are unusually sensitive to mesh quality, and the curvature needed to describe a geometry accurately makes good meshes hard to produce. This paper introduces NekMesh, an open-source high-order mesh generator that brings the available techniques into a single pipeline aimed at generating three-dimensional curvilinear meshes from CAD geometries.