Comput. Methods Appl. Mech. Engrg.

201204 (2012) 208227

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Comput. Methods Appl. Mech. Engrg.

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/cma

A novel scheme to generate meshes with hexahedral elements

and poly-pyramid elements: The carving technique
Dongwoo Sohn a, Young-Sam Cho b,, Seyoung Im a
a
b

Department of Mechanical Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), 291 Daehak-ro, Yuseong-gu, Daejeon 305-701, Republic of Korea
Division of Mechanical and Automotive Engineering, College of Engineering, Wonkwang University, 344-2 Sinyong-dong, Iksan-si, Jeonbuk 570-749, Republic of Korea

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Article history:
Received 17 September 2010
Received in revised form 1 September 2011
Accepted 2 September 2011
Available online 10 September 2011
Keywords:
Mesh generation
Poly-pyramid elements
Moving least square (MLS)-based nite
elements
Marching cube algorithm

a b s t r a c t
A novel scheme for three-dimensional mesh generation, termed the carving technique, is proposed with
the aid of poly-pyramid elements. Soaking the geometry information of a given model into a regular reference mesh with brick elements, the reference mesh is trimmed by the surface of the model using the
marching cube algorithm. The trimmed elements are reconstructed by the proposed elements, which
here are termed the poly-pyramid elements. Therefore, the nite element mesh is automatically generated from the surface information. Shape functions of the poly-pyramid elements are constructed by
moving least square (MLS) approximation. Numerical results are presented to examine the performance
of the poly-pyramid elements and to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.
2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction
In the framework of nite element method (FEM), mesh generation is a necessary pre-processing for the mechanical or thermal
analysis of problem domains. Meshes with nite elements should
satisfy the connectivity condition and the compatibility condition
in order to guarantee convergence and exactness of the solution.
The meshing may not be straightforward if the problem domain
has a certain complex geometry. Although many auto-meshing
algorithms have been developed, the mesh generation is still troublesome in many cases.
In particular, it is very difcult to generate meshes with compatible hexahedral elements when modeling three-dimensional complex geometry. For this reason, generally, tetrahedral elements are
used for three-dimensional modeling. However, the hexahedral elements show better in performance than the tetrahedral elements,
due to the presence of bilinear and trilinear terms in the shape function. Therefore, the hexahedral elements are preferred for use in
FEM if possible. Many works have been conducted on the modeling
of arbitrary congurations with the hexahedral elements by way of
various approaches [14], such as mapped meshing algorithms [5,6]
including octree approaches, sweeping algorithms, and multi-block
methods; direct methods [713] including grid-based algorithm,
advancing front or plastering algorithm, and whisker weaving
algorithm; and indirect methods [1,2,14] that combine several
Corresponding author. Tel.: +82 63 850 6994; fax: +82 63 850 6691.
E-mail address: youngsamcho@wku.ac.kr (Y.-S. Cho).
0045-7825/$ - see front matter 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.cma.2011.09.002

tetrahedral elements into a hexahedral element or decompose a tetrahedral element into four hexahedral elements.
Especially, the grid-based methods [810,15] and the advancing
front methods [11,12,16] are widely known as the most successful
methods to automatically generate unstructured quadrilateral and
hexahedral meshes [17]. The grid-based methods, also called insideoutside algorithms, are based on the background grid over
the given model. These methods remove the elements located outside the model and on the model boundaries, and then t the outer
remaining mesh to the boundary geometry and topology. In contrast, the advancing front methods, also called outside-inside algorithms, start with a quadrilateral mesh formed on the model
boundaries. On the outer layer, the hexahedral elements are constructed from the quadrilateral mesh. By advancing the front of
the element layer from the boundary to the inner part, continuously, the hexahedral elements are generated over the entire
domains.
Thus far, the grid-based methods and the advancing front methods have been found to be useful with regards to the construction of
a mesh for complex domains. Nevertheless, it remains difcult to
construct appropriate meshes around complicated geometries in
an efcient manner. In the grid-based methods, as the nodes of
remaining elements are moved to the model boundaries, some elements may be severely distorted and the shape of element may not
be maintained as a hexahedron. Otherwise, in the advancing front
methods, the inner part may not be lled with the hexahedral elements, because the elements are generated from the boundary of
model, layer by layer. Therefore, the additional treatments should

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D. Sohn et al. / Comput. Methods Appl. Mech. Engrg. 201204 (2012) 208227

be introduced to generate the high quality elements over the entire

domains. In particular, it is difcult to resolve these issues for the
complex geometry, e.g., domains with irregular surfaces, arbitrary
inner voids, multiple materials. For three-dimensional structures
with an arbitrarily complex geometry, a general and efcient
scheme is not yet developed [13].
The purpose of this work is to suggest a new meshing scheme
based on the marching cube algorithm [1820] with the hexahedral elements. Our approach utilizes the similar concept of the conventional grid-based methods. However, the elements intersecting
with the model boundaries are not removed, but trimmed by the
marching cube algorithm. In this work, we apply the trimming process with the marching cube algorithm and the non-conventional
elements to the regions of model boundaries, instead of the complicated procedures to t nodes on the outer layer to model boundaries and to smooth the generated mesh over the entire domain.
The process of our proposed meshing scheme is as follows:
First, a reference mesh with brick-shaped hexahedral elements is
prepared. Subsequently, the elements intersected with the model
surface are trimmed by the marching cube algorithm. According
to the marching cube algorithm, the active and non-active nodes
are separated from the hexahedral elements. The active node denotes a certain node which is included in the model. On the other
hand, the non-active node means a node which is not included in
the model. Due to the trimming process, the elements intersecting
with the model surface are cut off; in the next step, only the elements located around surface are modied into or replaced with
new elements that properly represent the model surface. Most of
elements remain brick-shaped, as in the initial reference mesh.
However, there are some limitations when reconstructing the
trimmed elements using the conventional types of nite elements,
such as tetrahedral elements or hexahedral elements, because it is
difcult to meet the node connectivity condition and the compatibility condition at the interface with the intact hexahedral elements that remain untrimmed. To resolve this issue, we propose
new types of elements termed poly-pyramid elements that include pentagonal and hexagonal pyramid elements. In this paper,
the pentagonal and the hexagonal pyramid elements are newly
developed by means of moving least square (MLS) approximation.
MLS approximation has been used to construct the shape function
for various meshfree methods [21]. Furthermore, Kim [22,23], Cho
et al. [2426], and Lim et al. [2729] applied MLS approximation to
FEM to handle discontinuities due to nonmatching interfaces. We
will show that the aforementioned combination of this new meshing scheme with the poly-pyramid elements by MLS approximation makes FEM process efcient. Once the geometry information
is prepared, the entire process, from mesh generation to analysis,
can be automatically conducted without cumbersome techniques.
Hereafter, the proposed scheme is termed the carving technique.
The outline of the paper is as follows: in Section 2, we describe
the construction of the shape function for the poly-pyramid elements by MLS approximation. Subsequently, the method of mesh
generation is discussed in Section 3. Numerical examples are given
in Section 4, and discussed there as well is the simplicity and efciency of the proposed scheme. Finally, we close the paper with
concluding remarks in Section 5.
2. Development of poly-pyramid elements
The poly-pyramid elements are composed of one polygon face
and several triangle faces of which the number is the same as that
of edges of the polygon face. According to the shape of the polygon,
the elements are named triangular, quadrilateral, pentagonal, and
hexagonal pyramid elements, respectively. In this section, we
briey describe the MLS approximation and then explain the

process of constructing the shape functions of the pentagonal and

the hexagonal pyramid elements. Furthermore, the methods of
numerical integration for the poly-pyramid elements are discussed.
2.1. Shape functions of poly-pyramid elements
When the variable n indicates the coordinate (n, g, f), the MLS
interpolant uh(n) of vector eld u(n) is written as

uh n

NB
X

pj naj n pT nan;

j1

where NB is the number of the polynomial basis p(n), and a(n) is a

coefcient vector to be determined by the MLS approximation. In
three-dimensional problems, the linear basis is as follows:

pT n 1; n; g; f NB 4:

The functional to be minimized in the least-square sense is given as

NP
X

xn  nI pT nan  uI n2 ;

I1

where I indicates a nodal point, NP is the number of nodes having

non-zero values of weight function x(n  nI), and uI(n) is the value
of u at n = nI. The coefcient a(n) is calculated by minimizing the
functional in Eq. (3)

@J
Mnan  BnU 0;
@a

with

Mn PT WnP and Bn PT Wn;

where P, W(n  nI) and U in the case of NB = 4 are given as

g1
g2
g3

1 n1

61 n
2
6
6
6 1 n3
P6
6. .
6. .
4. .

..
.

f1
f2
f3
..
.

3
7
7
7
7
7
7
7
5

1 nNP gNP fNP N N

P
B
2
x1 n  n1
0
0
6
x
n

n

0
0
2
6
2
6
6
0
0
x3 n  n3
W6
6
..
..
..
6
.
.
.
4
2

0
u1

u2

0
u3    uNP




0
0


..
.

0
..
.

   xNP n  nNP

3
7
7
7
7
7
7
7
5

NP NP

6
7
:
UT 4 v 1 v 2 v 3    v NP 5
w1 w2 w3    wNP 3N
P

Substituting a(n) from Eq. (4) in Eq. (1), the interpolant is rewritten
as

uh n pT nM1 nBnU

NP
X

/I nuI ;

I1

where uI is the Ith column vector of UT. The shape function /I(n) can
be obtained as follows:

/I n

NB X
NB
X

pj nM1
jL BLI :

j1 L1

If the domain of inuence for the weight function dened at each nodal point is limited to the interior of the poly-pyramid element, the
shape functions by MLS approximation do not affect any elements,

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except the elements including the node at which the weight function
is dened. In this case, the shape functions have the basic properties
of nite elements, such as the partition of unity, the linear completeness, and the Kronecker delta condition [2430]. Therefore, these
types of elements satisfy the compatibility condition between the
adjacent elements. These are known as MLS-based nite elements
with variable nodes [2729].
It is critical to dene the weight function in the development of
the poly-pyramid elements. The pentagonal and the hexagonal
pyramid elements in the master domain are shown in Fig. 1(a)
and (b), respectively. First, considering the weight function used
to construct the shape function of the pentagonal pyramid element, the right of Fig. 1(a) shows the cross-section of the pentagonal pyramid element on the ng-plane at a given value of f. The
weight functions of node I (I = 1, 2, . . ., 6) are dened as follows:

x1 f;
xI 1  f

3
Y

x 0; I A B ; I A B  dA B

Ij Ij

j1

Ij Ij

Ij Ij

I1;

where I A B indicates the distance between the vertex I and the
Ij Ij

edge AIj BIj which connects the vertex AIj to BIj , as shown in the right
of Fig. 1(a). The indices AIj and BIj can be expressed in a Matlab-like
denition as follows:

AIj I j  5  FLOORI j=7;

BIj I j 1  5  FLOORI j 1=7;

where the command FLOOR returns the greatest integer less than
or equal to the value in parentheses. Here, superscript denotes
the vertices on a cross-section of f = constant, intersected by the
edges connecting node 1 and nodes 26. The coordinate of I, which
is identical to that of node I when f = 0, is expressed as a function of

n (n, g, f) in the right of Fig. 1(a). The distance between an arbitrary

point n (n, g, f) and the edge AIj BIj is indicated by dA B .
Ij Ij

The quartic spline function x used in Eq. (7) is given as

8


 0
>
< 1  6x2 8x3  3x4 for x xxx
 6 1;
1 x0


xx; x0 ; x1
 0
>
:0
for x xxx
 P 1:
1 x0

In the case of I 1, the weight functions in Eq. (7) are constructed

by product of the quartic spline functions and the linear function in
the f-direction. Therefore, the value of the weight function is 1  f
at its own vertex I, and 0 at others.
Similarly, the weight function of the hexagonal pyramid element is obtained through a combination of the quartic spline functions and the linear function in the f-direction. The cross-section of
the hexagonal pyramid element on the ng-plane is shown in the
right of Fig. 1(b). In the case of the hexagonal pyramid element,
the weight function of node I (I = 1, 2, . . ., 7) can be dened in the
same form as Eq. (7), and the indices AIj and BIj are given as follows:

AIj I j  6  FLOORI j=8;

BIj I j 1  6  FLOORI j 1=8:

10

Due to the symmetric

pyramid element,
 property of the hexagonal

the value of x 0; 2 6 7 ; 26 7  d6 7 , which is equal to


x 0; 2 3 4 ; 2 3 4  d3 4 , is not used in the calculation of x2. In
the same manner, all weight functions of the hexagonal pyramid
element are dened without duplication of the equal spline
functions.
Fig. 2(a) and (b) show the weight functions of the pentagonal
and the hexagonal pyramid elements, respectively, except x1,
which is a linear function of f. For a constant f 2 [0, 1], the values
of the weight function in the master domain vary between 0 and
1  f. Utilizing the weight functions dened as in Eq. (7), we obtain

Fig. 1. Poly-pyramid elements and their cross-sections on the ngplane in the master domain: (a) a pentagonal pyramid element and (b) a hexagonal pyramid element.

D. Sohn et al. / Comput. Methods Appl. Mech. Engrg. 201204 (2012) 208227

211

Fig. 2. The weight functions for a constant f 2 [0, 1]: (a) a pentagonal pyramid element and (b) a hexagonal pyramid element.

the shape functions of the pentagonal and the hexagonal pyramid

elements, as shown in Fig. 3(a) and (b). These shape functions are
linear at the element boundary and are compatible with adjacent
elements. Inside the pentagonal and the hexagonal pyramid elements, the shape functions are given in the rational type, not polynomial functions [24,28]. We will discuss the performance of the
present poly-pyramid elements in Section 4 with the aid of numerical examples.
2.2. Gauss integration by partitioning the domain of a poly-pyramid
element
Considering the numerical integration for the aforementioned
poly-pyramid elements, there are several ways to conduct integration in nite element or meshfree methods. A stabilized conforming
nodal integration (SCNI) [30] was proposed to implement the
numerical integration in meshfree methods [21], and the smoothed
integration method [29,31] was developed to apply the concept of

SCNI to FEM. Furthermore, the generalized Gaussian quadrature

rules [32] were developed for the two-dimensional domain.
In this paper, the domain of each poly-pyramid element is rst
partitioned into subdomains, and Gaussian integration is applied
to the individual subdomains. This refers to integration by partitioning for a polygon in a two-dimensional domain [33]. Although
nodal integration and generalized Gaussian quadrature rules can
be utilized to improve the efciency and accuracy in the calculation for the poly-pyramid elements, more cumbersome and complex procedures are required, in contrast to integration by
partitioning. Focusing on the development of poly-pyramid elements and novel meshing scheme rather than the optimization
of the integration scheme, we choose the integration by partitioning, which is a simple and straightforward scheme that can be used
to calculate the coordinates and weights of Gauss integration
points in the master domain.
The integration by partitioning procedure is illustrated in Fig. 4.
First, the pentagonal pyramid element is partitioned into ve

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Fig. 3. The shape functions obtained using MLS approximation with the weight function in Fig. 2: (a) a pentagonal pyramid element and (b) a hexagonal pyramid element.

quadrilateral pyramid-shaped subdomains in the master domain,

as shown in Fig. 4(a). To obtain the location of the Gauss integration points in the master domain, used is the mapping from the
hexahedral element to each subdomain. The hexahedral element
is dened as the parental domain of each subdomain. Given that
Gauss integration points in hexahedral elements are easily generalized, it is straightforward to obtain the coordinates and weights of
the Gauss integration points for higher order integration. Furthermore, the Jacobian matrix, which represents the isoparametric
mapping from the master coordinate (n, g, f) to the physical coordinate (x, y, z), is dened at Gauss integration points in the parental
domain. In the same manner, the above procedure is applied to a
hexagonal pyramid element with six subdomains, as illustrated
in Fig. 4(b). When the order of Gauss integration is n, the number
of the integration points is n3 in the parental hexahedral element.
The total number of integration points for the pentagonal and the
hexagonal pyramid element is then 5n3 and 6n3, respectively.

Similarly, tetrahedral subdomains can be also used for the integration by partitioning the elements. However, for the tetrahedral
subdomain, it is complicated to calculate the coordinates and
weights of the integration points for higher order integration. In
contrast, the Gauss integration points of the hexahedral domain
can be easily calculated even for the higher order integration. Since
the shape functions, which are derived by the MLS approximation,
are given in the form of the rational functions inside the element,
the higher order integration is required to obtain more accurate
solution. Therefore, in this paper, the integration scheme is limited
to the integration by partitioning the element into the quadrilateral pyramid-shaped subdomains, as shown in Fig. 4.
3. Mesh generation with the aid of poly-pyramid elements
In this section, a novel scheme to generate a mesh, termed the
carving technique, is proposed with the aid of the poly-pyramid

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D. Sohn et al. / Comput. Methods Appl. Mech. Engrg. 201204 (2012) 208227

Parental domain

Parental domain

2
4

4
6

Subdomain

7
5

Master domain

Subdomain

Master domain

y
x

Physical domain

y
x

Physical domain

Fig. 4. Numerical integration scheme by partitioning the poly-pyramid elements: (a) a pentagonal pyramid element and (b) a hexagonal pyramid element.

Fig. 5. Schematic diagram for the trimming process in the carving technique: (a) reference mesh with brick elements; (b) surface information soaked into the reference mesh;
and (c) nal conguration of the model obtained by the trimming process.

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D. Sohn et al. / Comput. Methods Appl. Mech. Engrg. 201204 (2012) 208227

Active node
Non-active node (to be removed)

Triangulated surfaces
which may not be co-planar

Fig. 6. Eight cases of the reference brick elements to be trimmed by the surface information.

Triangular, quadrilateral, pentagonal,

and hexagonal pyramid elements
from faces of a hexahedral element

Triangular pyramid elements

from the trimmed face
intersecting with the model surface

Fig. 7. Reconstruction of the trimmed brick elements with the aid of poly-pyramid elements.

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D. Sohn et al. / Comput. Methods Appl. Mech. Engrg. 201204 (2012) 208227
Table 1
The procedure of the carving technique.
Step 1
Trimming
process

Step 2
Splitting
process

Loop over 12 element edges:

 Find intersection point (s) of each element edge and the given model surfaces, and add an additional node Nis on each intersection point.
End loop.
If the intersection point exists on the element edge:
Loop over 8 element nodes:
 Check whether each node is active Nac or non-active Nna by a normal vector of the model surface.
End loop.
 Form the trimmed face Ft by connecting the nodes Nis, and triangulate the faces Ft.
Go to Step 2.
Else, end process to keep the hexahedral element untrimmed.
 Remove the non-active node (s).
 Add a node Nin in the interior of the trimmed element.
 Classify into the triangulated faces Ft newly formed in Step 1, and the pre-existing faces Fr from the hexahedral element.
In the case of the faces Ft,
 Generate triangular pyramid elements by connecting Nis to Nin.
In the case of the faces Fr,
 Generate triangular, quadrilateral, pentagonal, and hexagonal pyramid elements by connecting Nac and Nis to Nin.

Exterior node

Outer part

3: Triangular pyramid element

(Tetrahedral element)
4: Quadrilateral pyramid element
5: Pentagonal pyramid element
6: Hexagonal pyramid element

Inner part

4
3

3
3

3
3

6
6

3
3

3
3

3
3

3
3
Fig. 8. The patch test for poly-pyramid elements: (a) the geometry of the model to be divided into 7 parts; (b) the composition of inner part by 12 poly-pyramid elements;
and (c) the composition of outer part by 16 poly-pyramid elements.

elements discussed in Section 2. Furthermore, we discuss the

adjustment of nodal positions to enhance the mesh quality generated by the carving technique.
The procedure of the carving technique is divided into two
steps: the trimming and the splitting processes. The rst step is

based on the marching cube algorithm [1820]. Soaking the

geometry information, e.g., a stereolithography (STL) le, into a reference mesh which consists of regular brick elements, the reference mesh is trimmed with the geometry information, as
depicted in Fig. 5. The inner nodes of the model surfaces are active,

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Relative errors and absolute error

10-3

10

Relative error in displacement norm

Relative error in energy norm
Maximum error norm (m)

-4

10-5

10

-6

10-7

2
3
4
5
6
The order of Gauss integration for each subdomain
Fig. 9. The errors of the patch test with respect to the integration order for each
subdomain in the pentagonal and the hexagonal pyramid elements.

and the outer nodes are eliminated. The trimmed surfaces are newly formed by connecting the intersection points of the element
edge and the model surface. These may not be co-planar due to
the curvature of model surface. For this reason, the trimmed surfaces should be triangulated to represent the given geometry information. Fig. 6 shows eight cases of the trimmed brick elements. In
Fig. 6, the closed and open circles indicate the active nodes and the
non-active nodes (to be removed), respectively. If all nodes of the
element are non-active, the element is excluded from the next procedure. Otherwise, the element, which has only active nodes, remains as the brick element.
This trimming process for all regular brick elements may be
accompanied by an expensive cost. In particular, if the model is
complex, the computational cost may increase, because a large
number of reference brick elements have to be used to represent
the complex geometry of the model. Accordingly, it is worth considering a way to improve computational efciency. In this work,
only the elements located in the vicinity of the model surfaces
are stored in advance of trimming process. By doing so, the trimming process is conducted for only a fraction of the entire
elements.
In the second step, the non-conventional types of elements,
which are carved by the marching cube algorithm, are reconstructed
by adding one node in the interior of each reference element and
splitting the reference element into several pyramid elements, as
shown in Fig. 7. In this work, we have decomposed the non-conventional elements into the poly-pyramid elements. An additional node
is introduced at the inner space of the non-conventional element,
and the outer faces of the element are then connected to the additional node to construct the poly-pyramid elements. The position
of the additional node could be determined according to the rule explained in Appendix A. The trimmed surface, which is exposed to
outer space and generated by the surface of domain, may not be
co-planar, and then it should be triangulated as mentioned before.
Meanwhile, the carved surfaces, which exist at the inside of domain,
from the pre-existing hexahedral element are remained as planar
surfaces. Therefore, we could let them as triangle, quadrilateral,
pentagon, or hexagon faces. For this reason, from the triangulated
faces intersecting with the model surface, only triangular pyramid
elements are generated by connecting the triangle faces and the
additional node. Moreover, from the carved pre-existing faces, the

Fig. 10. The distribution of rmean for the meshes of a sphere, generated from: (a)
10  10  10 reference brick elements; (b) 20  20  20 reference brick elements;
and (c) 30  30  30 reference brick elements.

various poly-pyramid elements are reconstructed by the polygon

and the additional node. Fig. 7 illustrates the procedure to decompose the non-conventional elements shown in Fig. 6 into several
poly-pyramid elements. At this point, an additional effort is not
required to formulate the shape functions of the triangular and
quadrilateral pyramid elements, as the triangular pyramid element
is identical to the tetrahedral element and because the shape functions of the quadrilateral pyramid can be obtained by degenerating
the hexahedral elements. Otherwise, the shape functions of the
pentagonal and the hexagonal pyramid element are obtained by
MLS approximation, as discussed in Section 2.

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Relative error in displacement norm

10

-4

From 10x10x10 reference elements

From 20x20x20 reference elements
From 30x30x30 reference elements

10-5

10

-6

10

-7

2
3
4
5
6
The order of Gauss integration for each subdomain

10-3
From 10x10x10 reference elements
From 20x20x20 reference elements
From 30x30x30 reference elements

Relative error in energy norm

Through the above two steps, the surface information for the
specic model and the reference brick element are transformed
into a mesh appropriate for FEM. The entire procedure of the mesh
generation according to the present scheme is applicable to the
fully automatic algorithm, and its usage is very simple. Considering
the trimming and splitting processes for one hexahedral element,
the procedure is described in Table 1.
Recall that the poly-pyramid elements satisfy the necessary
conditions to utilize in the framework of FEM. As the domain of
inuence for the weight function is limited to the interior of the
poly-pyramid element, the partition of unity and Kronecker delta
condition are satised. Since the linear basis is used in the MLS
approximation, the linear completeness is satised inside the elements. Moreover, the linear interpolation is kept along all element
edges and on the triangle faces of the poly-pyramid elements,
respectively. Therefore, the triangle faces of the poly-pyramid elements are compatible to the triangular pyramid elements without
any gaps or overlaps. The quadrilateral face of quadrilateral pyramid element is connected to the face of another quadrilateral pyramid element or hexahedral element in a seamless way. The
compatibility condition is also kept on the pentagon face of the
pentagonal element. The reason is that the pentagonal pyramid
element, from the trimmed element by the marching cube algorithm, meets always another pentagonal pyramid element. Similarly, the hexagonal pyramid element meets another element of
the same type, and two hexagonal pyramid elements are compatible on the hexagon face. Due to these characteristics of the polypyramid elements, the framework of FE analysis does not change.
Any additional process is not required in the coupling of two
poly-pyramid elements, and of the poly-pyramid element and
the hexahedral element. That is, the procedures of calculating the
local stiffness matrices and assembling the global stiffness matrix
are the same as those of conventional FE analysis. The stiffness matrix remains symmetric and positive denite.
When the intersection point on the element edge is very close
to the active node, the elements generated by the carving technique could have poor quality. In this case, some poly-pyramid elements become relatively small and skew, and hence they lead to
ill-conditioned stiffness matrix. Therefore, we introduce a simple
way to enhance the mesh quality. This way can be optionally inserted between the trimming and the splitting processes. The procedure of the adjustment of nodal positions is explained in
Appendix B.

10-4

10

-5

10-6

2
3
4
5
6
The order of Gauss integration for each subdomain

10-5
From 10x10x10 reference elements
From 20x20x20 reference elements
From 30x30x30 reference elements

To demonstrate the performance of the proposed scheme, we

choose several numerical examples. Firstly, two examples a
patch test and a sphere under hydrostatic pressure are used to
check the validity of the poly-pyramid elements in terms of its
accuracy. Particularly, it is demonstrated that the proposed meshing scheme is very simple in the example of the sphere under
hydrostatic pressure. In the third and the fourth examples, we discuss the modeling and analysis of a femur and a cube with the randomly distributed voids, whose geometries are very complex.
Throughout all examples, the second-order integration is used for
the tetrahedral and the hexahedral elements. Meanwhile, varying
orders of integration are employed for the integration by partitioning for the pentagonal and the hexagonal pyramids to examine its
effect on the convergence.
In the rst two examples, the exactness and convergence of the
proposed scheme are veried in terms of the relative errors in the
displacement norm and energy norm, as given in Eqs. (11) and
(12), respectively, as well as maximum error norm in Eq. (13)

Maximum error norm (m)

4. Numerical results and discussion

10-6

10

-7

10-8

2
3
4
5
6
The order of Gauss integration for each subdomain
Fig. 11. The errors of the sphere with respect to the integration order for each
subdomain in the pentagonal and the hexagonal pyramid elements: (a) the relative
error in displacement norm; (b) the relative error in energy norm; and (c)
maximum error norm.

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D. Sohn et al. / Comput. Methods Appl. Mech. Engrg. 201204 (2012) 208227

v
uPnnode  exact
2
u i1 u
 uhi
i
t
Ed
Pnnode  exact 2 ;
ui
i1
v
uR
u eexact  eh T Ceexact  eh dX
;
Ee t X R
exact T Ceexact dX
X e


Em max uexact
 uhi ;
i
16i6nnode

11

12
13

where X is the entire domain and nnode is the total number of

nodes. The exact strain and the exact displacement corresponding
to the problem are denoted by eexact and uexact, respectively. In addition, eh and uh indicate the numerically calculated values.
Furthermore, the carving technique is compared with its variational scheme. By additionally decomposing the pentagonal and
the hexagonal pyramid elements into several tetrahedral elements,
the mesh can be reconstructed by only the tetrahedral and the
quadrilateral pyramid elements, and the hexahedral elements.
Throughout the comparison, we discuss the effectiveness of the
carving technique with the pentagonal and the hexagonal pyramid
elements.
4.1. Patch test
A patch test was conducted to check the accuracy and convergence of the proposed method. The model of the patch test in
Fig. 8(a) was performed with a cube domain measuring
4 m  4 m  4 m, Youngs modulus E = 1.0  106 Pa and Poissons
ratio m = 0.3. The model is considered as a composition of seven
parts, and the inner part is surrounded by six outer parts. Each part
consists of several poly-pyramid elements, including triangular,

quadrilateral, pentagonal, and hexagonal pyramid elements.

Fig. 8(b) and (c) show the composition of the inner part, and the
upper outer part, which is one of the outer parts. The total number
of elements in the entire model is 93: There are 69 triangular pyramid elements, 12 quadrilateral pyramid element, 6 pentagonal
pyramid elements, and 6 hexagonal pyramid elements.
We impose at the exterior nodes, as indicated in Fig. 8(a),
the following linear displacement eld with constant
strain: u 103 2x y z=2 m; v 103 x 2y 2z=2 m; w
103 x y 2z=2 m. Consequently, three error norms are
calculated by Eqs. (11)(13): the relative errors in displacement
norm and energy norm, and the maximum error norm. Their values
are plotted in Fig. 9, with respect to the order of integration for
each subdomain by partitioning the poly-pyramid elements. As
mentioned in Section 2.2, the numbers of integration points of
the pentagonal and the hexagonal pyramid elements are 5n3 and
6n3, respectively, when the integration order is n. Fig. 9 shows that
the errors decrease gradually as the integration order increases.
Because the shape functions of the pentagonal and the hexagonal
pyramid elements would be given in the form of the rational functions due to the MLS approximation, the result becomes more
accurate as the order increases [24,28]. The lower order Gauss
integration is not enough to obtain an exact integral value of the
rational function. Therefore, we should implement the higher order
Gauss integration for the acceptable magnitude of errors.
4.2. Sphere under hydrostatic pressure
To check whether or not the model obtained by the present
scheme represents uniform mean stress, a sphere is considered under hydrostatic pressure. The top of Fig. 5 shows the procedure to

Fig. 12. The shape of femur and the boundary conditions imposed on top and bottom sides.

D. Sohn et al. / Comput. Methods Appl. Mech. Engrg. 201204 (2012) 208227

219

Fig. 13. The meshes of the femur and the contours of von Mises stress obtained by: (a) the carving technique and (b) the use of Hypermesh and Abaqus.

model the sphere, whose radius r is 1 m. Soaking the surface information into the reference brick elements, the mesh for FEM is

generated with the poly-pyramid elements. The displacements of

the nodes on the surface are given to make the related surface node

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D. Sohn et al. / Comput. Methods Appl. Mech. Engrg. 201204 (2012) 208227

Fig. 14. The contours of von Mises stress on the cross-section of the femur at z = 158.66 mm obtained by: (a) the carving technique with the poly-pyramid elements and (b)
the use of Hypermesh and Abaqus with the tetrahedral elements.

4.3. Femur with complicated surfaces

As another example of modeling with general and complex
geometry, a static analysis of a femur was carried out. Due to the
fact that the shape of the femur is very complex as shown in
Fig. 12, the conventional meshing schemes are associated with
troublesome procedures involving an extremely large number of
elements to ensure the accuracy of the solution. Moreover, the
quality of the meshes may not be guaranteed by the traditional
scheme. In contrast, the carving technique proposed in this paper
has advantages of simplicity and efciency in the modeling of
the complicated geometry.
The boundary conditions are imposed as follows: As shown in
Fig. 12, the bottom face of the model is xed, and displacements
in the negative z-direction with a magnitude of 1 mm are prescribed
at the nodes whose z-coordinate is greater than 169.23 mm. The

126
The carving technique
Hypermesh & Abaqus
Reference solution
125
Total strain energy (mJ)

moves to origin of the sphere, i.e., they are prescribed in the form
of dr = (u2 + v2 + w2)1/2 = 0.01 m, where u, v, and w indicate the displacements in the x-, y-, and z-directions, respectively. The material properties are given as E = 1.0  106 Pa and m = 0.3.
In this example, the meshes are generated from 10  10  10,
20  20  20, and 30  30  30 reference elements. Fig. 10 displays the mean stresses dened as rmean = (rxx + ryy + rzz)/3 for
these three models, using the sixth-order integration for each subdomain of the pentagonal and the hexagonal pyramid elements.
The mean stress of the exact solution is 25,000 Pa, which is uniformly distributed throughout the entire domain. It can be seen
from Fig. 10 that the results by the proposed scheme are very similar to the exact values. Furthermore, the relative errors and maximum error were calculated according to Eqs. (11)(13) to examine
the accuracy in a strict sense. Fig. 11(a) and (b) display the relative
error in the displacement norm and energy norm versus the integration order in each subdomain. The maximum error norm is also
plotted in Fig. 11(c) with respect to the integration order. These gures show that the errors decrease in the case of higher order integration, consistent with the tendency in the rst example.

124

123

122

10000

20000
30000
40000
The number of nodes

50000

60000

Fig. 15. The total strain energy of the femur versus the number of nodes.

Table 2
The time spent on the modeling and analysis of the femur.
Scheme

The number of
nodes

The number of
elements

Wall-clock time (s)

Modeling

Analysis

The carving
technique

6,101
12,752
22,917
55,612

13,421
26,202
44,472
98,254

0.437
0.828
1.500
4.453

10.766
24.719
45.844
128.781

Hypermesh and
Abaqus

6,683
12,809
22,860
56,047

32,486
64,923
119,249
302,921

1.203
2.013
3.370
8.507

7
14
27
95

D. Sohn et al. / Comput. Methods Appl. Mech. Engrg. 201204 (2012) 208227

material properties of the femur are given as E = 15 GPa and

m = 0.25. Setting the allowable relative errors to 106, as in the two
previous examples, we deduce that the sixth-order integration for
the integration by the partitioning of the pentagonal and the hexagonal pyramid elements may be needed to obtain the same level of
accuracy. Therefore, all results in this example were obtained using
the sixth-order integration of the poly-pyramid elements, which
comprises only a fraction of the entire elements.
According to the procedure of the carving technique as shown
in the bottom of Fig. 5, several meshes were prepared by varying
the numbers of reference elements. Fig. 13(a) shows the meshes
for each model with the total number of nodes and elements.
The distributions of von Mises stress are also shown in Fig. 13(a).
To verify whether or not these results by the carving technique
are reasonable, we conducted modeling and analysis of this problem using Hypermesh 9 and Abaqus 6.10, commercial packages
for FE analysis. The meshes with four-node linear tetrahedral

221

elements were generated by Hypermesh, and then FE analyses

were conducted by Abaqus. The mesh congurations and the von
Mises stress contours are shown in Fig. 13(b). It can be seen from
Fig. 13(a) and (b) that the results by the carving technique and
Abaqus are very similar to each other. In particular, nearly the
same distributions of von Mises stress are observed in the right
bottoms of Fig. 13(a) and (b) which display the results with the ner meshes by the carving technique and by the use of Hypermesh
and Abaqus, respectively. Fig. 14 displays the distribution of von
Mises stress on the cross-section of the ner models in Fig. 13(a)
and (b), where the z-coordinate equals 158.66 mm. It is observed
that the stress contour by the carving techniques is in good accord
with the result by Abaqus, as is evident from Fig. 14.
Furthermore, the total strain energy was calculated to check the
tendency of convergence. Fig. 15 displays the curves of the total
strain energy versus the total number of nodes, according to three
solutions: red indicates the solution from the present carving

Fig. 16. The model description of a cube with voids: (a) the random distribution of various sized voids and (b) the geometry and boundary conditions.

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D. Sohn et al. / Comput. Methods Appl. Mech. Engrg. 201204 (2012) 208227

Fig. 17. The distributions of von Mises stress in the cube with voids obtained by: (a) the carving technique; (b) the use of Hypermesh and Abaqus with linear tetrahedral
elements; and (c) the use of Hypermesh and Abaqus with quadratic tetrahedral elements.

technique, while blue from Hypermesh and Abaqus models with

four-node linear tetrahedral elements, and orange from another
type of the Hypermesh and Abaqus model with ten-node quadratic
tetrahedral elements. Note that the total strain energy from the
Hypermesh and Abaqus models with the quadratic elements is obtained as the converged value, 122.09 mJ, with 424,910 nodes and
302,921 elements. In this context, this converged solution is employed as a reference solution to which other solutions may be
compared. It is noticed that our solution from the carving technique approaches the reference solution faster than the solution
from the Abaqus models with four-node linear tetrahedral elements, as the renement is enhanced with the increasing total
number of nodes.
To verify the efciency of the proposed scheme, we evaluated
the wall-clock time to generate nite element meshes and to obtain the solutions. Using Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Extreme CPU X9770

(3.2 GHz), the time for mesh generation and analysis was measured as shown in Table 2. When the models are constructed with
the similar number of nodes, it is observed from Table 2 that the
carving technique is cheaper than Hypermesh in the aspect of computational cost of modeling. In the case of analysis, Abaqus provides better performance than the carving technique, because
Abaqus is the commercial tool which adopts the advanced techniques to reduce the computational time. It is noteworthy that
the carving technique gives the accurate solutions with low cost
of modeling.
4.4. Cube with the randomly distributed voids
A cube including sphere-shaped voids, illustrated in Fig. 16(a),
is chosen as an example of the model with inner trimmed surfaces.
Inside the 100 mm  100 mm  100 mm cube, total 30 voids are

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D. Sohn et al. / Comput. Methods Appl. Mech. Engrg. 201204 (2012) 208227

23.2

The carving technique

Hypermesh & Abaqus
Reference solution

23.0
Total strain energy (J)

randomly distributed, and radii of voids vary from 10 mm to

20 mm. Using conventional meshing algorithms, the modeling is
accompanied by cumbersome procedures if there are the trimmed
surfaces inside the model. Therefore, this problem can be regarded
as an appropriate example to examine the effectiveness of the
carving technique.
The displacement boundary conditions are imposed on bottom
and top faces of the cube, as shown in Fig. 16(b). The displacements
in the z-direction are prescribed as zero at the nodes located on the
bottom face, and the displacements in the x- and y-directions are
prescribed at two nodes to avoid rigid body motions. Otherwise,
on the top face, the displacements in the negative z-direction are
imposed with a magnitude of 0.1 mm. The material of the model
is aluminum with E = 70 GPa and m = 0.32. Similar to the previous
example, the sixth-order integration is used for the integration
by the partitioning of the pentagonal and the hexagonal pyramid
elements.
Fig. 17(a) displays the distributions of von Mises stress, which
are obtained by using the meshes from the carving technique. Even
though the voids are located inside the cube and on the face of the
cube, the meshing procedure is the same as that for the case without the inner trimmed surface. To conrm the accuracy of the results with poly-pyramid elements, we again conducted the
modeling and analysis using Hypermesh and Abaqus with fournode linear tetrahedral elements because there is no analytic solution for this example. The analysis results from Hypermesh and
Abaqus are shown in Fig. 17(b). The distributions of von Mises
stress from the Hypermesh and Abaqus models are very similar
to the results from the carving technique.
In addition, the maximum stress of each model appears at the
same position, and it becomes higher as the number of nodes increases, as shown in Fig. 17. The maximum values by the carving
techniques are higher than those by the use of Hypermesh and
Abaqus when the similar number of nodes is used in the analyses.
However, all these values are bounded by the maximum stress of a
reference solution, 370.859 MPa, which were calculated by using
Abaqus with ten-node quadratic tetrahedral elements. As depicted
in Fig. 17(c), this value was obtained with 544,780 nodes and
385,286 elements, and may be regarded as the reference solution.
The carving technique gives a smaller discrepancy between their
results and the reference solution than the use of Hypermesh
and Abaqus.
In the same manner as the previous example, we also evaluated
the tendency of convergence in terms of the total strain energy.
The results from the carving technique are compared with those
from Hypermesh and Abaqus in Fig. 18. It is observed that the values of the total strain energy from the two meshing schemes are
converged in almost the same ratio, as the number of nodes increases. However, the values from the carving technique are lower
than those from Hypermesh and Abaqus. To check which values
are more accurate, the results are compared with the converged
value, 22.050 J, of the reference solution with the quadratic tetrahedral elements. From the fact that the result from the carving
technique is closer to the reference solution than the result from
Hypermesh and Abaqus, it is found out that the carving technique
with the hexahedral and the poly-pyramid elements provides better solutions than Abaqus with the four-node linear tetrahedral
elements.
Finally, the carving technique is compared with the use of
Hypermesh and Abaqus in terms of computational cost. The
wall-clock time spent on the mesh generation and analysis is measured using the identical computer system mentioned in the previous example, and the values are summarized in Table 3. Comparing
the carving technique with the use of Hypermesh and Abaqus
when the numbers of nodes or degrees of freedom are on a similar
level, it can be seen that the carving technique generates the

22.8

22.6

22.4

22.2

22.0
10000

20000

30000 40000 50000 60000

The number of nodes

70000

Fig. 18. The total strain energy of the cube with voids versus the number of nodes.

Table 3
The time spent on the modeling and analysis of the cube with the randomly
distributed voids.
Scheme

The number of
nodes

The number of
elements

Wall-clock time (s)

Modeling

Analysis

The carving
technique

11,213
31,961
69,134

19,734
50,698
102,210

0.453
1.641
4.484

38.579
92.203
216.782

Hypermesh and
Abaqus

10,028
38,528
72,235

48,796
200,804
385,286

1.830
6.293
11.833

11
74
187

meshes faster than Hypermesh, while Abaqus gives the solution

faster than the carving technique. These are consistent with the
tendencies of the previous example.
4.5. Numerical performance of pentagonal and hexagonal pyramid
elements
In the splitting process of the carving technique, the trimmed
elements are decomposed into the poly-pyramid elements including the pentagonal and the hexagonal elements. We now consider
a variation of the carving technique, with additional decomposition
of the pentagonal and the hexagonal pyramid elements into several tetrahedral elements. By doing so, the mesh is composed of
only the tetrahedral and the quadrilateral pyramid elements, and
the hexahedral elements.
First, a three-dimensional cantilever beam is considered under
transverse loading condition as shown in Fig. 19(a). The material
properties are given as E = 210 GPa and m = 0.3. Fig. 19(a) displays
40  8  8 reference brick elements of the cantilever beam. To
examine the performance of the carving technique and its variational version, the reference brick elements are trimmed by four
inner surfaces and decomposed as shown in Fig. 19(b). Moreover,
the mesh is constructed with only the tetrahedral elements, by
decomposing a reference brick element into ve tetrahedral elements as shown in Fig. 19(c). In the same manner, based on
60  12  12, 80  16  16 and 100  20  20 reference brick elements, more rened meshes were obtained. Using the various
meshes, convergence tests were carried out for the problem of
the cantilever beam.

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D. Sohn et al. / Comput. Methods Appl. Mech. Engrg. 201204 (2012) 208227

(a)

u=v=w=0

P = 10 MPa

20 mm

y
100 mm
z

(b)

20 mm

Mesh generation by the carving technique

y
z

y
z

A pentagonal
pyramid element

Triangular
pyramid
elements

A hexagonal
pyramid element

Additional decomposition for a variation of the carving technique

(c)
y
z

x
Triangular pyramid elements over the entire domain

Fig. 19. A cantilever beam under transverse loading condition: (a) the geometry and boundary conditions for the reference brick elements; (b) the mesh generated by the
carving technique and its variation; and (c) the mesh with tetrahedral elements over the entire domain.

Fig. 20(a) shows tip deections in the y-direction at the node,

indicated by A in Fig. 19(a), with respect to the number of nodes.
It is observed that the deections for the hexahedral elements,
which are the best result, converge much faster than those for the
others, as the number of nodes increases. Otherwise, the deections
for the tetrahedral elements are relatively small with a low convergence ratio. Between the results of the hexahedral and the tetrahedral elements, there are the results from the carving techniques, as
well as those from the variation of the carving techniques without
the pentagonal and the hexagonal pyramid elements. Meanwhile,
the values of the total strain energy are plotted in Fig. 20(b). The tendency of convergence in terms of the total strain energy is consistent
with that in terms of the tip deections.
Subsequently, the variation of the carving technique is applied
to the previous two examples. For the modeling and analysis of
the femur, the meshes are reconstructed from those in Fig. 13(a)
by decomposing the pentagonal and the hexagonal pyramid ele-

ments into the tetrahedral elements. In the same manner, for the
cube with the randomly distributed voids, the meshes are reconstructed from those in Fig. 17(a) without the pentagonal and the
hexagonal pyramid elements. Fig. 21(a) and (b) show the values
of the total strain energy from the variation of the carving technique with the results in Sections 4.3 and 4.4. It can be seen that
the carving technique provides slightly better results, closer to
the reference solution, than its variation.
From the above results in this section, we can deduce as follows: In the framework of the carving technique, the pentagonal
and the hexagonal pyramid elements do not signicantly affect
the results in the simple problems such as the cantilever beam.
However, in more practical problems, these elements play a role
to enhance the accuracy of solutions. Besides, when various types
of the poly-pyramid elements are directly used in the splitting process, we can reduce an additional cost to decompose them into the
tetrahedral elements. Therefore, it is worthwhile to apply the pen-

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D. Sohn et al. / Comput. Methods Appl. Mech. Engrg. 201204 (2012) 208227

0.485

126
The carving technique
The variation of the carving technique
Hypermesh & Abaqus
Reference solution

125
Total strain energy (mJ)

Tip deflection (mm)

0.480

0.475

124

123

The carving technique

The variation of the carving technique
Hexahedral elements
Tetrahedral elements

0.470

122
0

10000

20000
30000
40000
The number of nodes

50000

970

10000

23.2

20000
30000
40000
The number of nodes

50000

60000

The carving technique

The variation of the carving technique
Hypermesh & Abaqus
Reference solution

965

23.0
Total strain energy (J)

Total strain energy (mJ)

960

955

950

945
The carving technique
The variation of the carving technique
Hexahedral elements
Tetrahedral elements

940

22.8

22.6

22.4

22.2

22.0

935
0

10000

20000
30000
40000
The number of nodes

10000

50000

20000

30000 40000 50000 60000

The number of nodes

70000

Fig. 20. The tendency of convergence according to the elements used in the
cantilever beam problem, in terms of: (a) tip deections and (b) the total strain
energy.

Fig. 21. The tendency of convergence in terms of the total strain energy, according
to the elements used in: (a) the example in Section 4.3 and (b) the example in
Section 4.4.

tagonal and the hexagonal pyramid elements to the carving

technique.

Acknowledgements

5. Conclusion
In this paper, a novel meshing scheme, termed the carving technique, is proposed. The scheme is based on the marching cube
algorithm in combination with the poly-pyramid elements by
MLS approximation. The carving technique simplies the mesh
generation procedure. In particular, a strong advantage is gained
when it is applied to structures with a complicated geometry. Furthermore, the entire process, from modeling to analysis, can be
implemented automatically.
Through several numerical examples, the performance of the
poly-pyramid elements developed in this paper was veried and
efcient applications of the carving techniques were shown. The
proposed scheme is expected to be useful for various applications,
such as three-dimensional crack propagation, physics-based computer graphics, and others. Future work may include the proposed
scheme applied to more complex problems.

Y.-S. Cho gratefully acknowledges the support from Mid-career

Researcher Program through NRF grant funded by the MEST (No.
2009-0083774). S. Im and D. Sohn also appreciate the support from
NRF for the Grant (No. R0A-2007-000-20115-0).

Appendix A. Determination of the position of an additional

node for the proper element splitting
In the splitting process, an additional node is introduced in the
trimmed non-conventional elements. The position of the additional node should be appropriately determined to avoid negative
values of the Jacobian of the split elements. In this paper, we adopt
a simple way to determine the physical coordinate xa (xa, ya, za) of
the additional node, as follows:

xa

N el
1 X
xI ;
Nel I1

A:1

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D. Sohn et al. / Comput. Methods Appl. Mech. Engrg. 201204 (2012) 208227

b
Pentagonal
pyramid element

The intersection points

very close to the active nodes

Triangular
pyramid element
Shifting the active nodes
to the intersection points

Pentagonal
pyramid element

Pentagonal
pyramid element

Active node
Intersection point
Additional node in an element

Quadrilateral
pyramid element

Quadrilateral
pyramid element

Fig. B.1. Adjustment of nodal positions to improve the mesh quality: (a) the trimmed elements with the intersection points close to the active node and (b) shifting the active
nodes to the intersection point.

where Nel is the number of nodes in a trimmed element, and xI is the

physical coordinate of node I (I = 1, 2, . . ., Nel) in the trimmed element. In the majority of cases, the center in an average sense is valid, because the trimmed elements remain as the convex
polyhedrons or they have little geometrical non-convexity, as
shown in Fig. 6.
However, the averaged center may lead to the negative Jacobian
of the split elements, when the reference brick elements are not
sufciently ne or there is extremely sharp curvature in the model
surface. In this case, the trimmed elements may be severely nonconvex, and then another scheme should be considered to split
them without any elements which have the negative Jacobian.
For example, the nodal position can be determined through trial
and error. The position is iteratively shifted with a small perturbation from the center, until all of the split elements have the positive
Jacobian. Alternatively, the additional node can be placed on the
trimmed surface, not inside the non-convex elements.
Appendix B. Adjustment of nodal positions for small and skew
elements
Consider the trimmed elements which have the intersection
point close to the active node, as shown in Fig. B.1(a). In this case,
the distorted poly-pyramid elements may be generated with the
original nodal positions of the reference brick element in the splitting process. Therefore, if the distance between the intersection
point and the active node is less than the preset value of tolerance,
the active node is moved to the intersection point. In this work, the
tolerance is preset as 10% of the length of an element edge.
Fig. B.1(b) illustrates an example of the adjustment of nodal positions. Through this process, the carved shapes from the pre-existing faces of hexahedral element are changed: from quadrilateral
to triangle; from pentagon to triangle or quadrilateral; from hexagon to triangle, quadrilateral, or pentagon. By replacing the coordinate of the active node to that of the intersection point, the
splitting process is conducted without small and skew elements.
It is shown in Fig. B.1(b) that the mesh quality is improved by
the adjustment of nodal positions.
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