ABOUT SMOOTH INTERPOLATION OF A TRIANGULATED SURFACE
Abstract
A method and algorithm for rebuilding a surface triangulation in three-dimensional space defined by an STL file is proposed. An initial surface in 3D space (STL file) is represented as a polyhedron composed of triangular faces. The method is based on the analytical representation of the surface as a piecewise polynomial function. This function is built on a polyhedral surface composed of triangles and satisfies the following requirements: 1) within one face, the function is an algebraic polynomial of the third degree; 2) the function is continuous on the entire surface and preserves the continuity of the first partial derivatives; 3) the surface determined by the function passes through the vertices of the initial triangulated surface. The restructuring of computational meshes is required in cases of distortion of the shape of cells when solving problems of mathematical physics using mesh methods (finite-difference, FEM, etc.). Cell distortion can be due to various reasons. These can be large distortions of moving Lagrangian meshes in the calculations in the current configuration, with instability of the hourglass type, with distortion of the faces of the interface between interacting gaseous, liquid and elastoplastic bodies.
The rebuilding of the mesh reduces to solving the problem of constructing a smooth surface passing through the nodes of an existing triangulated surface or part of it. Later the nodes of the new mesh are placed on the constructed smooth surface with existing requirements for the size and shape of the cells. The construction of a smooth piecewise polynomial surface is based on the ideas of spline approximation and reduces to the building of a cubic polynomial on each triangular face, taking into account the smooth conjugation of polynomial pieces of the surface constructed on adjacent faces.
The proposed method for rebuilding surface triangulation can be useful for calculating the motion of deformable bodies when solving problems of the dynamics of continuous media on immovable Euler grids.
