Closing the gap of meshing ill-defined surface-based models

in: 2020 RING Meeting, ASGA

Abstract

Unstructured meshing of geological models relies on sealed boundary representations in which each boundary surface represents a geological interface between rock volumes. Surface-based models are very often geometrically ill-defined regarding the meshing requirements", meaning they are frequently tainted by small gaps and intersections between surfaces. Automatic repair and validation of these models are mandatory to unlock all workflows involving meshing operations, from direct meshing to iterative forward modeling. This paper presents a complete workflow solving these issues. Based on a repair process and a robust surface and volume mesh generator, our workflow makes possible to generate a volumetric unstructured mesh of any surface-based model even ill-defined ones. Given validity rules and a tolerance distance for repair, our process starts from a set of 3D triangulated surfaces, embeds them into a volumetric representation," iteratively modifies the surfaces to automatically converge to a sealed boundary representation suitable for robust unstructured meshing. This workflow is demonstrated on ill-defined surface-based models obtained from different modeler software to tetrahedral mesh generation.

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BibTeX Reference

@inproceedings{ANQUEZ_RM2020,
 abstract = { Unstructured meshing of geological models relies on sealed boundary representations in which each boundary surface represents a geological interface between rock volumes. Surface-based models are very often geometrically ill-defined regarding the meshing requirements", meaning they are frequently tainted by small gaps and intersections between surfaces. Automatic repair and validation of these models are mandatory to unlock all workflows involving meshing operations, from direct meshing to iterative forward modeling. This paper presents a complete workflow solving these issues. Based on a repair process and a robust surface and volume mesh generator, our workflow makes possible to generate a volumetric unstructured mesh of any surface-based model even ill-defined ones. Given validity rules and a tolerance distance for repair, our process starts from a set of 3D triangulated surfaces, embeds them into a volumetric representation," iteratively modifies the surfaces to automatically converge to a sealed boundary representation suitable for robust unstructured meshing. This workflow is demonstrated on ill-defined surface-based models obtained from different modeler software to tetrahedral mesh generation.   },
 author = { Anquez, Pierre AND Botella, Arnaud },
 booktitle = { 2020 RING Meeting },
 publisher = { ASGA },
 title = { Closing the gap of meshing ill-defined surface-based models },
 year = { 2020 }
}