Mesh association: formulation and algorithms

In computational simulation of coupled, multicomponent systems, it is frequently necessary to transfer data between meshes that may differ in resolution, structure, and discretization methodology. Typically, nodes from one mesh must be associated with elements of another mesh. In this paper, we formulate mesh association as a geometric problem and introduce two efficient mesh association algorithms. One of these algorithms requires linear time in the worst case if the meshes are well shaped and geometrically well aligned. Our formulation of the problem and our algorithms are more general than previous work and can be applied to surface meshes with curved elements.