Frame Field Guided Topological Improvement for Hex Mesh Using Sheet Operations

High-quality hex meshes are crucial for finite element analysis. However, the quality of a hex mesh improved by geometric smoothing cannot guarantee to satisfy the requirement of finite element analysis. To this end, this paper puts forward an approach to topological optimization of hex mesh based on frame field and sheet operations, which improves the quality of the worst elements of the hex mesh by optimizing its topological structure. The approach first builds an initial frame field on the input hex mesh and optimizes it to obtain a high-quality frame field. Then, the problematic sheet that leads to the poor quality of the hex mesh is determined according to the initial and optimized frame fields. Finally, the structure of the problematic sheet is adjusted based on the high-quality frame field and sheet operations. Experimental results demonstrate that our topological optimization approach can effectively improve the minimal Scaled Jacobian value of the hex mesh.