A New Topological Clean up Procedure for Triangular Meshes

Abstract

This paper describes a new topological clean up procedure to improve the quality of unstructured triangular meshes. As a post-processing step, the topological clean up procedure is applied both for elements that are interior to the mesh and for elements connected to the boundary and then Laplacian-like smoothing is used by default. Previous clean up algorithms are limited to eliminate the nodes of degree 3, 4, 8, 9, 10 and pairs of nodes of degree 5. In this study, a new clean up algorithm, which improves the quality of the triple connections with the degree of meshes 5 and 7 (i. e.; 5-7-5, 7-7-5, 7-5-7 etc.), is added. The suggested algorithm is applied to two example meshes to demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach on improving element quality in finite element meshes.