GHS3D overview

GHS3D is a fully automatic tetrahedral mesh generator suitable to create volume meshes for complex domains defined by a conforming mesh of the boundary (i.e., a surface triangulation). The volume mesh is governed by the properties of the surface mesh given as input. The latter governs the element density as well as the element shape quality. One of the main features of GHS3D is that it preserves the boundary integrity of the initial surface mesh (i.e., the entities of the mesh are present in the final mesh as face of tetrahedral elements).

Notice that surface mesh creation is not included in this software. Surface meshes can be created by feflo.a/AMG-lib, another software package from the Gamma project at INRIA.

In addition to the surface mesh, additional  internal entities (points, edges and faces) can also be explicitly specified as constrained entities that must be preserved in the resulting mesh.

Other features

• GHS3D can be used as a mesh optimization tool. In such case, a volume mesh previously created (by GHS3D or any other tool) is used as data file. This mesh is then optimized with respect to the element shape quality (aspect ratio)
• GHS3D also produces diagnostics about the surface correctness. It can be used to verify the validity of any surface mesh (event without constructing tetrahedra). GHS3D is able to very efficiently detect surface intersections, overlapping elements, holes, lack of conformity, etc.) and produces diagnostic, thus helping the user to correct the surface.
• GHS3D can also serves to construct a hull of a given cloud of point (no faces specified in this case). In some specific cases, this hull is the convex hull of the set of points.