System and method for polytopic mesh refinement

Abstract

A method is disclosed for partitioning an input polytope into a conformal set of polytopes according to a subdivision pattern specified on lower-dimensional boundaries of the input polytope. A feature of this method is that it is applicable to any dimension. For input polytopes that are hexahedra isomorphic to a 3-dimensional cube, all members of the conforming partition will be hexahedra isomorphic to a 3-dimensional cube. A further feature of the invention is that it preserves convexity; a convex input polytope will result in a conformal partition comprising convex polytopes. Finally, the method may be used to process large conformal meshes of input polytopes in parallel and produce a globally conformal partition without the requirement of communication between processes.