A Three-Dimensional Cartesian Mesh Generation Algorithm Based on the GPU Parallel Ray Casting Method

Abstract

Robust and efficient Cartesian mesh generation for large-scale scene is of great significance for fluid dynamics simulation and collision detection. High-quality and large-scale mesh generation task in a personal computer is hard to achieve. In this paper, a parallel Cartesian mesh generation algorithm based on graphics processing unit (GPU) is proposed. The proposed algorithm is optimized based on the traditional ray casting method in computer graphics, and is more efficient and stable for large-scale Cartesian mesh generation. In the process of mesh generation, the geometries represented by triangular facets are transformed into a mesh composed of orthogonal hexahedrons. A parallel ray generation method is proposed to reduce the data exchange between the host memory and device memory. A parallel primitives searching method based on lattice grid is adopted to search the triangular facets for intersection calculation between rays and triangles. The parallel Cartesian mesh generation algorithm has been implemented using CUDA library. The performance of parallel Cartesian mesh generation algorithm has been promoted enormously compared with the traditional the sequential algorithm, which is shown in different numerical experiments. Through some tests, the performance of parallel algorithm is analyzed, and the results show that the parallel computing power of the GPU is fully utilized. Finally, examples of Cartesian mesh generation are presented.

Experimental and Numerical Study on the Mechanical Behavior of Composite Steel Structure under Explosion Load

“…The numerical calculation of a three-dimensional explosion field often involves complex structures, and it is difficult to meet the practical engineering needs with manual modeling. To solve the problem of complex structure modeling, a MESH-3D pre-processing software [ 35 , 36 ] was developed by our research group according to the characteristics of the calculation program. This software can be arbitrarily complex structure for rapid grid generation and display, and it can provide good pretreatment data for the numerical calculation.…”

“…This software can be arbitrarily complex structure for rapid grid generation and display, and it can provide good pretreatment data for the numerical calculation. Thus, the pre-processing uses MESH-3D software [ 35 , 36 ] to mesh the composite steel structure model, and the results are shown in Figure 9 . The numerical calculation method in this paper is based on the finite difference method.…”

Researches on the Fast Determination of Cell Type of Cartesian Grid

“…To determine the inside/outside relationship of the Cartesian cells, the ray casting method [24] and the winding number approach [25] are the usually methods in most Cartesian grid generation programs. While both approaches conceptually straightforward, they are considerably different computationally.…”

Smart Farming: Intelligent Management Approach for Crop Inspection and Evaluation Employing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

“…The approach verifies if at least one of the vertices is within the polygon and then, in this case, the rectangle belongs to the final tiling. The Ray Casting algorithm is used, which indicates that if an imaginary ray is thrown out of the point, and the number of intersections with the sides of the polygon is odd, the point is included in the polygon, otherwise it is outside the polygon (straight line generation parallel to the axes from the point) [21]. In addition, this method was validated with the dominant point method , the dominant point (any point below and to the left of a point that does not belong to the selected area does not belong to the selected area) [22]., are used etc.…”