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Parallel tetrahedral mesh refinement with MOAB

Pebay, Philippe P.

In this report, we present the novel functionality of parallel tetrahedral mesh refinement which we have implemented in MOAB. This report details work done to implement parallel, edge-based, tetrahedral refinement into MOAB. The theoretical basis for this work is contained in [PT04, PT05, TP06] while information on design, performance, and operation specific to MOAB are contained herein. As MOAB is intended mainly for use in pre-processing and simulation (as opposed to the post-processing bent of previous papers), the primary use case is different: rather than refining elements with non-linear basis functions, the goal is to increase the number of degrees of freedom in some region in order to more accurately represent the solution to some system of equations that cannot be solved analytically. Also, MOAB has a unique mesh representation which impacts the algorithm. This introduction contains a brief review of streaming edge-based tetrahedral refinement. The remainder of the report is broken into three sections: design and implementation, performance, and conclusions. Appendix A contains instructions for end users (simulation authors) on how to employ the refiner.