Guaranteed-quality higher-order triangular meshing of 2D domains

Abstract

We present a guaranteed quality mesh generation algorithm for the curvilinear triangulation of planar domains with piecewise polynomial boundary. The resulting mesh consists of higher-order triangular elements which are not only regular (i.e., with injective geometric map) but respect strict bounds on quality measures like scaled Jacobian and MIPS distortion. This also implies that the curved triangles' inner angles are bounded from above and below. These are key quality criteria, for instance, in the field of finite element analysis. The domain boundary is reproduced exactly, without geometric approximation error. The central idea is to transform the curvilinear meshing problem into a linear meshing problem via a carefully constructed transformation of bounded distortion, enabling us to leverage key results on guaranteed-quality straight-edge triangulation. The transformation is based on a simple yet general construction and observations about convergence properties of curves under subdivision. Our algorithm can handle arbitrary polynomial order, arbitrarily sharp corners, feature and interface curves, and can be executed using rational arithmetic for strict reliability.