Improvement of quadrilateral meshes for discretization of tunnels

✍ Scribed by A.Menéndez Dı́az; C.González Nicieza; A.E.Álvarez Vigil

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2004
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 820 KB
• Volume: 31
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0266-352X
• DOI: 10.1016/j.compgeo.2003.10.001

✦ Synopsis

Automatic mesh generators of 2D polygonal domains, especially those that use structured meshes, generate elements (triangles or quadrilaterals), which, in relatively complex models, tend to lose their equilateral form. In order to avoid this, the posterior smoothing of elements is necessary to obtain meshes with minimum geometrical distortions. In this paper, one of these smoothing techniques is developed for use in underground modelling. A system of equations is generated in a similar mode to structural analysis, where the degrees of freedom are the smoothed values of each node coordinate, and the local stiffness matrix is a measure of the geometrical connectivity of each element in the mesh. This facilitates the smoothing of non-convex domains with interior islands, which allows the imposition of directionally constrained nodes on the boundary of the domain. At present, this method is being utilized to compliment our mesh generation technique for the discretization of tunnels in 2D.