A three-dimensional spherical mesh generator

Abstract

A new spherical mesh generator is described. It represents an efficient, deterministic packing of tetrahedra into a solid sphere, a spherical shell, or both. The mesh can be used for finite-element solutions to a wide variety of global numerical modelling problems in the geosciences. The nodes within the mesh are distributed uniformly, and long, thin tetrahedra are avoided. The method proposed here offers several advantages over 3-D Delaunay algorithms for finite-element mesh generation. For the related problem of trivariate scattered data interpolation, which is not considered here, the 3-D Delaunay algorithms are the method of choice.