Two-dimensional mesh generation, adaptive remeshing and refinement

This paper discusses the generation of unstructured triangular meshes by the advancing front technique. We also employ the technique to discretize surfaces. A simple and effective algorithm for the specification of element sizes is described. A similar idea is then applied to adaptive remeshing where a completely new mesh is created on the basis of the isolines of a certain important variable. The isolines are obtained from the FE-calculation based on the previous mesh. In this paper, attention is focused on the Poisson's equation. The optimal a priori error estimate for the problem is used to estimate the number of isolines needed for the remeshing. When the estimated error exceeds the tolerance in only a small part of the domain, the adaptive procedure is switched automatically to an adaptive refinement.