A hybrid meshing scheme based on terrain feature identification

Abstract

Hydrodynamic engineering makes profitably use of numerical simulations which rely on discrete element meshes of the topography. To cope with specific circumstances in river hydraulics, the presented hybrid meshing scheme comprises following proposals: river beds and areas of significant terrain slopes are meshed with regular elements to support user specified edge ratio and element orientation representing flow gradients appropriately; floodplains are represented as irregular triangle meshes, concatenating disconnected regular meshes while warranting high approximation quality. Automatic breakline detection approximates flow relevant changes in topographic gradients and defines borders of different mesh types. This paper presents an enhanced strategy for a terrain feature analysis based on b-spline analysis grids and on an interpolation scheme for breakline points in order to reduce the zigzag property of detected breaklines. This scheme for terrain analysis and meshing functionality is implemented in the open source software tool HybridMesh. © 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.