ABSTRACT
Quadrilateral (quad) and hexahedral (hex) meshes are superior to triangular and tetrahedral meshes in several aspects. This chapter reviews unstructured quad and hex mesh generation, and then talk about image-based meshing schemes. There are two main methods for unstructured quad meshing: indirect methods and direct methods. The chapter presents several important topics on quad and hex mesh generation, including refinement templates, adaptive meshing using hybrid octree, meshing for multiple-material domains, sharp feature preservation and rhombic dodecahedral-tree based hex meshing. Mapped meshing or sweeping is a straightforward method to generate structured quad and hex meshes. Unstructured quad and hex mesh generation attracts many researchers’ interests due to its broad applications in a lot of finite element simulations. The extracted uniform quad and hex meshes can be made adaptive using refinement templates, with the newly inserted vertices projected onto the boundary.
