Iso-contouring in Time Varying Meshes

Abstract

Dynamic meshing techniques are widely used in the Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) and Computational Mechanics (CM) simulations. Simulated moving parts or dynamic boundaries of simulation domain force a simulation mesh to change from one time step to another. So, geometry of the mesh cells and their number vary as the simulation time proceeds. This paper presents a novel approach for smooth iso-contours extraction from 2D dynamic mesh at and in between defined time slices. No assumption is made about mesh cells correspondence between successive time slices. The key idea of the proposed method is to establish an edge-edge correspondence between meshes at adjacent time steps. Then the data structure supporting an easy iso-contours interpolation from intermediate time slices is built. We provide the proof that our method produces correct results under defined conditions and demonstrate our approach on the data sets from the CFD simulations.