LayTracks3D: A New Approach to Meshing General Solids using Medial Axis Transform

This paper presents an extension of the all-quad meshing algorithm called LayTracks to generate high quality hex and hex- dominant meshes of 3D assembly models. LayTracks3D uses the mapping between the Medial Axis (MA) and the boundary of the 3D domain to decompose complex 3D domains into simpler domains called Tracks. Tracks in 3D are similar to tunnels with no branches and are symmetric, non-intersecting, orthogonal to the boundary, and the shortest path from the MA to the boundary. These properties of tracks result in desired meshes with near cube shape elements at the boundary, structured mesh along the boundary normal with any irregular nodes restricted to the MA, and sharp boundary feature preservation. The algorithm has been tested on a few industrial CAD models and hex-dominant meshes are shown in the result section. The paper also describes how this algorithm can be extended to produce all-hex meshes in general geometries.