Mandoline: robust cut-cell generation for arbitrary triangle meshes

Abstract

Although geometry arising "in the wild" most often comes in the form of a surface representation, a plethora of geometrical and physical applications require the construction of volumetric embeddings either of the geometry itself or the domain surrounding it. Cartesian cut-cell-based mesh generation provides an attractive solution in which volumetric elements are constructed from the intersection of the input surface geometry with a uniform or adaptive hexahedral grid. This choice, especially common in computational fluid dynamics, has the potential to efficiently generate accurate, surface-conforming cells; unfortunately, current solutions are often slow, fragile, or cannot handle many common topological situations. We therefore propose a novel, robust cut-cell construction technique for triangle surface meshes that explicitly computes the precise geometry of the intersection cells, even on meshes that are open or non-manifold. Its fundamental geometric primitive is the intersection of an arbitrary segment with an axis-aligned plane. Beginning from the set of intersection points between triangle mesh edges and grid planes, our bottom-up approach robustly determines cut-edges, cut-faces, and finally cut-cells, in a manner designed to guarantee topological correctness. We demonstrate its effectiveness and speed on a wide range of input meshes and grid resolutions, and make the code available as open source.