ADMESH: A Graphical User Interface for an Advanced Mesh Generator for Coastal Ocean Modeling
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Date
2012-06
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Publisher
The Ohio State University
Abstract
The development and implementation of an advanced mesh generator, called ADMESH, that is
capable of automatically producing high-quality unstructured meshes starting with only target minimum and
maximum element sizes and points defining the boundary and bathymetry/topography of the domain is presented. The
automatic mesh generator incorporates some the the latest and most advanced techniques recently developed
in the area of mesh generation, as well novel approaches to incorporate factors that are specific to the
problem of shallow water flow. Some of the techniques that are incorporated include a novel approach to
compute exact signed distance functions, which are widely used in the context of level set methods, the approximation
of piecewise linear coastline data by smooth cubic splines, which are used to compute shoreline
curvature, and a so-called mesh size function, which is used to determine element sizes and control the size
ratio of neighboring elements. The mesh generation approach is implemented in MATLAB and uses an interactive
Graphical User Interface (GUI) that allows the user to view and edit input data and produce relevant
output. The GUI also contains an option to extract coastline data via the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration’s (NOAA) web-based coastline extractor database. The capabilities of ADMESH will be
demonstrated in a series of examples and a number of meshes created by ADMESH will be presented and
assessed in terms of element quality.
Description
Keywords
mesh generation, shallow water, finite elements