A new approach to the development of automatic quadrilateral mesh generation

A methodology for the automatic mesh generation of quadrilateral elements is proposed. The methodology is based on the facts that (i) a region can always be subdivided entirely into quadrilaterals if the polygon which forms the boundary of the region has an even number of sides, (ii) a quadrilateral can be formed by two triangles which share a common side. By taking advantage of the techniques developed in an existing automatic triangular mesh generator, quadrilateral meshes can be generated according to the distribution of user specified element size over the domain of interest. In particular, an automatic quadrilateral mesh generator based on the advancing front technique for triangular mesh generation1 is described. Techniques to improve the quality of the generated quadrilateral meshes are introduced. The robustness and versatility of the mesh generator are demonstrated by a variety of examples.