ORI GI NAL ARTI CLE

A methodology for quadrilateral nite element mesh coarsening

Matthew L. Staten Steven Benzley
Michael Scott
Received: 21 July 2006 / Accepted: 15 February 2007 / Published online: 27 March 2008
Springer-Verlag London Limited 2008
Abstract High delity nite element modeling of con-
tinuum mechanics problems often requires using all
quadrilateral or all hexahedral meshes. The efciency of
such models is often dependent upon the ability to adapt a
mesh to the physics of the phenomena. Adapting a mesh
requires the ability to both rene and/or coarsen the mesh.
The algorithms available to rene and coarsen triangular
and tetrahedral meshes are very robust and efcient.
However, the ability to locally and conformally rene or
coarsen all quadrilateral and all hexahedral meshes pre-
sents many difculties. Some research has been done on
localized conformal renement of quadrilateral and hexa-
hedral meshes. However, little work has been done on
localized conformal coarsening of quadrilateral and hexa-
hedral meshes. A general method which provides both
localized conformal coarsening and renement for quad-
rilateral meshes is presented in this paper. This method is
based on restructuring the mesh with simplex manipula-
tions to the dual of the mesh. In addition, this method
appears to be extensible to hexahedral meshes in three
dimensions.
Keywords Adaptivity Quadrilateral Coarsening
Renement Finite elements
1 Introduction
To accurately model continuum mechanics phenomena
with nite elements, the ability to adapt a mesh to the
physics of the phenomena is paramount. Adaptation
requires the ability to both rene (i.e., add elements) and
coarsen (i.e., delete elements) in a localized specied
domain.
Conformability requirements of nite element meshes
require adjacent elements to share common nodes and
edges. In 3D meshes, adjacent elements must also share
faces. These requirements are easily met in triangular and
tetrahedral meshes but are difcult to maintain in quadri-
lateral and hexahedral meshes. While changes in triangular
and tetrahedral meshes are easily localized, even small
changes to quadrilateral and hexahedral meshes often
propagate through the mesh resulting in a global rather than
a local modication. The conformability conditions that
make rening and coarsening difculty in quadrilateral and
hexahedral meshes are described in Sect. 2 of this paper.
Signicant development for the adaptation of triangular
and tetrahedral meshes has taken place. Robust schemes,
based on longest-edge division, as well as the extension to
include adaptive de-renement to coarsen a rened tetra-
hedral mesh, are described by Carey and Plaza [1, 2]. Plaza
and Rivara [3] developed an iterative longest-edge
Sandia National Laboratories is a multiprogram laboratory operated
by Sandia Corporation, a Lockheed Martin Company, for the United
States Department of Energy under Contract DE-AC04-94AL85000.
M. L. Staten (&)
Sandia National Laboratories, P.O. Box 5800, MS 0376,
Albuquerque, NM 87185-0376, USA
e-mail: mlstate@sandia.gov
URL: www.sandia.gov
S. Benzley
Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, USA
e-mail: seb@byu.edu
URL: www.et.byu.edu
M. Scott
Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences (ICES),
The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA
e-mail: mscott@ices.utexas.edu
URL: www.ices.utexas.edu
1 3
Engineering with Computers (2008) 24:241251
DOI 10.1007/s00366-008-0097-y
renement scheme that reduces the average propagation
path of a renement. De Cougny and Shephard [4] provide
a detailed description of both renement and coarsening of
tetrahedrons as applied to parallel computations. Other
useful algorithms have also been developed and imple-
mented for adaptation of tetrahedral [57].
Less attention has been given to the development of
conformal adaptation algorithms for all-quadrilateral and
all-hexahedral meshes. Iterative octrees [8] have been
proposed, but such methods result in non-conformal ele-
ments, which cannot be accommodated by some solvers.
Some techniques use non-quadrilateral or non-hexahedral
elements that result in hybrid meshes [9, 10] or require
global uniform dicing to maintain a consistent element type
[11]. Most quadrilateral and hexahedral renement methods
use some kind of template insertion method such as the
method introduced by Zhang and Bajaj [12]. A directional
renement method, as proposed by Schneiders [13] pro-
duces a conformal mesh by pillowing layers in alternating i,
j, and k directions but relies upon an initial cartesian octree
hexahedral mesh. A slight modication to Schneiders
approach has been suggested by Kwak and Im [14]. Li and
Cheng [15] have proposed an adaptation scheme that begins
with a mapped denition of a six-sided cube and selectively
inserts 3D transition templates at the corners or along the
edges. This method, however, is restricted to solids that
initially conform to traditional mapping schemes. A 3D
anisotropic renement scheme presented by Tchon et al.
[16, 17] expands Schneiders multi-directional renement
to initially unstructured meshes by pillowing layers of ele-
ments without the use of octrees. Harris [18] presents a
renement process that is not dependent upon initial map-
ped or octree-based grids and also allows more exibility in
regions of the mesh that are smaller than entire hex ele-
ments or are more easily described specically around
individual nodes, element edges, and element faces. Borden
et al. [19] provides a method of hexahedral coarsening,
however, the coarsening effect propagates throughout the
mesh rather than remaining localized. Kallinderis and Ka-
vouklis [20] propose a method which provides both
renement and coarsening of hybrid 3D meshes composed
of hexahedral, pyramids, prisms and tetrahedral. The
coarsening procedure, however, can only be performed in
regions where the coupled renement procedure previously
rened. In addition, the coarsening cannot coarsen beyond
the initial input mesh. Ideally, a truly general coarsening
procedure would operate on any input mesh regardless of
origin. A recent paper by Benzley et al. [21] provides a
general method for conformal localized quadrilateral
coarsening which is based on templates. Although this
method does not depend upon any previously applied
renements, it does require special element congurations
to exist in the initial mesh, which limits its applicability.
This paper presents a new method which can be used for
localized conformal coarsening and renement of quadri-
lateral meshes. The presented method works on both
unstructured and structured meshes with no restrictions on
initial element congurations, mapping patterns, or previ-
ous renements. Section 5 describes the authors efforts to
extend the presented method to three dimensions for
coarsening and renement of hexahedral meshes.
2 Features of the dual of quadrilateral meshes
The constraints that must be met by meshing a geometrical
shape with conformal all-quadrilateral meshes are explained
in this section. These constraints are clearly described by
introducing a dual [22] representation of the mesh.
A single quadrilateral element is shown in Fig. 1a. This
element is dened by four nodal points, four edges con-
necting the nodes, and a face dened by the closure of the
edges. A dual representation of this element can be
established by connecting the midpoints of opposite edges
with a line dened as a chord as shown in Fig. 1b. Note
that a quadrilateral element has two chords that intersect at
the centroid of the element.
Figure 2 shows a simple conformal quadrilateral mesh.
The dashed lines in Fig. 3 show the dual of the mesh in
Fig. 2. Note that in conformal quadrilateral meshes, the
chords in individual elements combine into continuous
chords which wind and twist through the mesh. The
number of chords in a mesh is dened by Eq. 1, where
P
boundary
is the number of chords which start and stop on a
boundary edge and P
circular
is the number of chords which
close upon themselves.
P
total
P
boundary
P
circular
1
Each chord forms a quadrilateral mesh column. The
total number of elements in a quadrilateral mesh can then
be dened by Eq. 2, where N
i
is the number of elements in
the mesh column dened by chord i
N
total

1
2
X
P
total
i1
N
i
: 2
Fig. 1 a A single quadrilateral, b dual chords of a single quadrilateral
242 Engineering with Computers (2008) 24:241251
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3 Simplex dual chord operations
In this section we dene some operations which can be
performed on quadrilateral meshes and the resulting
changes to the mesh dual.
3.1 Chord extraction
Nearly any chord in a quadrilateral mesh can be extracted.
Associated with a chord are pairs of nodes on opposite
sides of the chord. Extraction of the chord is accomplished
by merging these pairs of nodes as illustrated in Fig. 4. In
order to maintain conformability requirements, the entire
chord must be extracted. Extracting only a portion of a
chord would result in either a non-conformal mesh, or
require the introduction of a triangular element.
The dashed line in Fig. 5 illustrates a chord which
cannot be extracted. This is because it extends through a
portion of the mesh that has only a single element through
the thickness. Extraction of this chord would require
merging nodes on opposite geometric curves, which would
result in invalid geometric associativity.
The extraction of a dual chord reduces the number of the
elements in the quadrilateral mesh by N
i
, where N
i
is the
number of elements along the chord. As a result, chord
extraction does apply some coarsening to this mesh.
However, since the entire chord must be extracted, the
coarsening affect is propagated along the entire length of
the chord. Since dual chords may extend into portions of
the mesh where coarsening is not desired, chord extraction
alone is not sufcient for adaptive coarsening.
3.2 Chord dicing
Any chord in a quadrilateral mesh can also be diced [23,
24], or subdivided any number of times. In a chord, there
are a series of edges which are perpendicular to the chord.
By splitting each of these edges, and connecting the split
points of adjacent edges, the chord is diced. Figure 6
illustrates two iterations of the dicing operation performed
on a quadrilateral mesh dual chord. The dicing of a dual
chord increases the number of elements in the mesh by N
i
.
Fig. 2 Quadrilateral mesh example
Fig. 3 Dual of example mesh
Fig. 4 Dual chord extraction
Engineering with Computers (2008) 24:241251 243
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However, like chord extraction, the affect is along the
entire length of the chord. Therefore, chord dicing alone is
not sufcient for adaptive renement.
3.3 Element collapse
Figure 1b illustrates that each quadrilateral element is
really the intersection of two dual chords. The intersection
of these dual chords can be removed by performing an
element collapse operation [25]. An element is collapsed
by merging two opposite nodes of the quadrilateral, as
shown in Fig. 7. Note the reconguration of the dual
showing how the two chords no longer intersect. The ele-
ment collapse operation reduces the number of elements in
the mesh by one.
3.4 Element open
The element open operation [25] has the inverse affect of
the element collapse operation. Two dual chords which
previously did not cross can be redirected so that they do
cross as illustrated in Fig. 8.
3.5 Doublet insertion
Another operation which modies the dual is the doublet
insertion [25]. A doublet is inserted by inserting two
edges and a node on a line that connects two opposite
nodes of a quadrilateral element. This line is referred to as
a doublet. Figure 9 illustrates a chord in a quadrilateral
mesh and a doublet insertion which is performed on one
of the quadrilaterals associated with the chord. The two
new quads share two edges which forces poor element
quality. Although this operation creates an unusable mesh,
because of the poorly shaped new elements that are
formed, we will show in later sections that this is just an
intermediate step and one of the resulting chords will
ultimately be removed leaving a valid mesh as well as
allowing a coarsening operation. The value in the doublet
insertion is its affect on the mesh dual. The doublet
Fig. 5 Example of dual chord which cannot be extracted
Fig. 6 Dual chord dicing
Fig. 7 Dual modications from
an element collapse
244 Engineering with Computers (2008) 24:241251
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insertion operation increases the number of elements in
the mesh by one.
3.6 Element edge swap
An element edge swap [25] is performed by reconguring
the nodes of two adjacent quadrilaterals such that the edge
between them is dened by two different nodes. Figure 10
illustrates the element edge swap. Note that the element
edge swap operation removes the intersection between two
dual chords. The element swap operation does not change
the number of elements in the mesh.
4 Quadrilateral coarsening
The previous section presented methods for the extraction
and dicing of dual chords which reduce the element counts
in quadrilateral meshes. In addition, the previous section
presents methods which can be used to modify the mesh
dual in order to control the path of dual chords. These two
concepts can be combined to produce a localized confor-
mal mesh coarsening and renement method.
Figure 11 illustrates the coarsening procedure on an
unstructured quadrilateral mesh. In step 1, nine elements
are identied indicating where coarsening is desired. In
Fig. 8 Dual modications from
an element open
Fig. 9 Dual modication from
a doublet insertion
Fig. 10 Dual modications
from an edge swap
Engineering with Computers (2008) 24:241251 245
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step 2, three dual chords are identied which run along the
perimeter of the coarsening region. All three of the iden-
tied chords extend outside of the coarsening region. As a
result, simple extraction of these chords would result in the
coarsening affect propagating unnecessarily. In steps 3 and
4, we perform dual operations, in this case doublet inser-
tions, in order to redirect the identied chords. These dual
operations result in a single dual chord whose path is
limited to the coarsening region. We call this single dual
chord the Adaptive Chord. In step 5, the Adaptive Chord
is extracted from the mesh.
The change in number of elements is dened by Eq. 3
where N
extracted
is the number of elements in the Adaptive
Chord, C is the number of element collapse operations
performed, O is the number of element open operations
performed, and D is the number of doublets inserted. In this
example, the original mesh has 51 elements, while the
coarsened mesh has 44 elements.
DN
total
D O C N
extracted
3
The localization of the coarsening is maintained by
careful construction of the Adaptive Chord such that it
stays within the coarsening region. In the example in
Fig. 11 the elements density remains constant except for in
and immediately around the specied coarsening region. In
addition, the doublets which were inserted were removed
during the extraction of the Adaptive Chord. Further, ele-
ment quality improvement is achieved after coarsening as
illustrated in Step 6 by performing smoothing and
quadrilateral cleanup operations to decrease the number of
irregular nodes [25].
If the creation and extraction of a single Adaptive Chord
does not provide the desired amount of coarsening, the
procedure can be repeated as many times as necessary for
additional coarsening. Figure 12 shows several examples
of this coarsening algorithm. Note that both structured and
unstructured meshes are accommodated.
In the example illustrated in Fig. 11, doublet insertions
were used to create the Adaptive Chord. Instead, equally
valid Adaptive Chords could have been created with ele-
ment collapse, element open or edge swap operations.
Figure 13 illustrates the same initial mesh with a different
set of elements selected for coarsening. Option 1 illustrates
that an Adaptive Chord could be created by inserting three
doublets. Option 2 illustrates that an equally valid Adap-
tive Chord can also be created by doing a single element
collapse. Figure 14 shows another example with yet
another set of elements specied for coarsening. Option 1
illustrates that three doublets could have been inserted to
form an Adaptive Chord. Option 2 illustrates shows
another equally valid Adaptive Chord formed by inserting
one doublet and performing one element open operation.
These examples illustrate that the types of operations per-
formed during the creation of the Adaptive Chord depend
upon the way that the identied bounding chords intersect.
In addition, rather than the three chords identied in
step 2 of Fig. 11, a different set of chords could have been
chosen from which to construct the Adaptive Chord. The
Fig. 11 Quadrilateral
coarsening procedure
246 Engineering with Computers (2008) 24:241251
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element collapse, element open, edge swap, and doublet
insertion operations do not guarantee that the resulting
mesh will be non-inverted. In practice, several different
sets of chords and modication operations could be
examined to determine which set will result in the highest
quality coarsened mesh. If, after all possible combinations
of chords and operations are examined, no combination is
found that will result in reasonable element quality, the
coarsening algorithm could return a signal indicating that
further coarsening is not possible. However, this situation
is only likely to occur in areas where there are numerous
geometric constraints, or where numerous iterations of
coarsening have been previously applied.
If instead of coarsening, renement is desired, the
Adaptive Chord can be diced as many times as desired until
the proper element density is obtained. For renement,
after the dicing is performed, the doublets inserted previ-
ously must be removed and smoothing performed in order
to improve element quality. Figure 15 illustrates the
renement procedure. As seen in step 6, this type of
renement is heavily dependent on smoothing after dicing
is performed to better distribute the new elements
throughout the renement region. This dependency makes
this renement less efcient than other renement meth-
ods. However, the prospect of having a single algorithm
which can be used for both coarsening and renement is
appealing.
The target applications of the proposed coarsening
algorithm currently require all-quadrilateral meshes. As
such, an investigation into the applicability of the proposed
Fig. 12 Quadrilateral
coarsening examples
Engineering with Computers (2008) 24:241251 247
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algorithm on quad/tri meshes has not been performed.
However, allowing triangular elements would allow the
partial extraction of chords, which would eliminate the
need to redirect bounding chords into a single Adaptive
Chord, greatly simplifying the procedure.
5 Future work
5.1 Operation selection
When forming an Adaptive Chord, there are typically many
combinations of operations which can be used, all with
equally valid results. Additional research is needed to
further investigate when each operation is most appropri-
ate. This decision could be based on a number of factors
including valency of nearby nodes, proximity to the
boundary, quality of the original elements, and aspect ratio
of the original elements.
5.2 Coupled renement
As mentioned in the previous section, the algorithm
described for coarsening can also be used for renement of
quadrilateral meshes by dicing of the Adaptive Chord
rather than extraction. The prospect of having a single
algorithm which provides both coarsening and renement
is appealing. As a result, additional research is needed on
how Adaptive Chords can be better formed in the rene-
ment region in order to lessen its dependency on smoothing
after dicing.
5.3 Hexahedral coarsening
The concepts of dual chord modication, extraction, and
dicing extend directly to three dimensions for hexahedral
sheets or twist plane from the Spatial Twist Continuum [19,
23, 24, 26]. Like a dual chord in a quadrilateral mesh, a
dual sheet can be extracted or diced in a hexahedral mesh.
Figure 16a shows a simple hexahedral mesh with a single
sheet highlighted and drawn separately in Fig. 16b. This
sheet can be extracted as shown in Fig. 16c, or diced as
shown in Fig. 16d. In addition, the quadrilateral dual
operations of element collapse, element open, doublet
insertion, and edge swap are extensible into three dimen-
sions as the column collapse (Fig. 17), column open
(Fig. 18), doublet column insertion (Fig. 19), and face
swap operations (Fig. 20). It is anticipated that these
operations can be performed in order to create Adaptive
Sheets whose paths are limited to the specied coarsen-
ing/renement region. These Adaptive Sheets can then be
either extracted for hexahedral coarsening or diced for
hexahedral renement.
6 Conclusions
A general method to locally and conformally coarsen all-
quadrilateral nite element meshes has been presented.
While there are existing publications on quadrilateral/
Fig. 13 Adaptive Chord creation example 1
Fig. 14 Adaptive Chord creation example 2
248 Engineering with Computers (2008) 24:241251
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hexahedral renement, this is the rst published work to
our knowledge on a general localized conformal quadri-
lateral/hexahedral coarsening procedure. Experience with
triangle/tetrahedral adaptive analyses have proven the
value of having the ability to both rene and coarsen a
mesh. Consequently, the coarsening method outlined here
opens the door to a more complete adaptive solution for
quadrilateral and hexahedral meshes.
Fig. 15 Quadrilateral
renement procedure
Fig. 16 a Example hexahedral mesh, b highlighted sheet in (a)
drawn separately, c highlighted sheet is extracted, d highlighted sheet
is diced
Fig. 17 Hexahedral element column collapse, a two hexahedral
sheets intersecting in a column, b the intersection column drawn
separately, c the intersection column is collapsed, d the original sheets
after column is collapsed
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The coarsening method is based on the reconguration
of chords, a mesh dual entity, to form dual chords conned
to the specied coarsening region (Adaptive Chords). The
Adaptive Chords are then extracted for local coarsening.
The algorithm can be used on both structured and
unstructured quadrilateral meshes.
Extension to three dimensions for localized conformal
hexahedral coarsening appears straightforward. The
coarsening method in hexahedral meshes is based on the
reconguration of sheets, a mesh dual entity, to form dual
sheets conned to a specied coarsening region (Adaptive
Sheets). The Adaptive Sheets are then extracted for local
coarsening.
The advantage of the presented algorithm is that it can
perform localized conformal coarsening on any quadrilat-
eral mesh, whereas previously published methods require
either special conguration of elements, the insertion of
non-quadrilateral elements, or a previously performed
renement which is simply removed. However, the crea-
tion of the Adaptive Chord and post-processing clean-up
operations eliminate any guarantee that reversing the
coarsening operation will result in the original mesh. The
ability to predictably and efciently reverse renement/
coarsening is critical in time-dependent FEM problems. As
a result, the primary application of the presented algorithm
is for equilibrium FEM problems, or in the creation of the
initial mesh for a problem. In fact, it is anticipated that this
Fig. 18 Hexahedral element column open, a a group of hexahedral
elements. b A series of internal faces in the hexahedral group
indicated by black line in (a, b) the internal faces are opened to form a
column of hexahedral elements, d the element group with the opened
column
Fig. 19 Hexahedral doublet insertion, a two hexahedral sheets
intersecting in a column, b the intersection column drawn separately,
c doublets inserted along length of column, d the original sheets after
doublet insertion
Fig. 20 Hexahedral element face swap, a two hexahedral sheets
intersecting in a column, b two columns drawn separately, c a face
swap is performed between the two columns, d the original sheets
after column face swap
250 Engineering with Computers (2008) 24:241251
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tool will be very valuable in the generation of hexahedral
meshes. The current state-of-the-art hexahedral mesh
generation technique is the pave- and sweep- method [27,
28]. However, sweeping often inserts too many elements
when the cross-section of the sweep path decreases sub-
stantially. After sweeping, this presented coarsening
algorithm can be applied to remove excess elements in
non-critical regions before the analysis is performed.
Like most algorithms for the creation/modication of
quadrilateral meshes, the value of the methods presented in
this paper are proven empirically since they currently lack
the mathematically provable theorems which typically
accompany triangle and tetrahedral mesh generation/mod-
ication algorithms. The quadrilateral methods presented
in this paper have been implemented and tested. Coarsen-
ing is successful on all models tested. Implementation of
the hexahedral coarsening algorithm is currently underway.
Once complete, additional testing will hopefully provide
additional empirical backing.
The algorithm can be modied to provide localized
conformal renement by dicing the Adaptive Chords,
rather than extraction. This holds the prospect of a single
algorithm which can be used for both coarsening and
renement, which would simplify the implementation of a
complete adaptive sizing module. However, there are
concerns that this form of renement may be too dependent
on smoothing for practical use.
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