Computer Science Seminar - University of Houston
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Computer Science Seminar

Toward Robust Structure-Aware Hexahedral Meshing

When: Friday, February 8, 2019
Where: PGH 232
Time: 11:00 AM

Speaker: Dr. Guoning Chen, University of Houston

Host: Dr. Panruo Wu

Mesh is a pivotal link between geometry and physics. Without quality meshes, investigations of bridge fracture limits, initiation of nanoscale film dewetting, and blood clogging in arteries become difficult to realize. To ensure accuracy and efficiency of physics-based simulations, high quality structured hexahedral (or hex-) meshes are preferred by nonlinear material models and thus sought by scientists and engineers. Despite the importance of structured hex-meshes, existing techniques rarely achieve explicit and effective control of the structure of the hex-mesh during mesh generation. This is mostly because generating usable hex-meshes is already a challenging task, let alone the control of their structure, given the incompatibility of the arbitrary 3D shapes and the hexahedral configuration. This is further worsened due to the lack of the understanding of the characteristics of this structure. In this talk, I will first define the hex-mesh structure, called base complex. Next, I will briefly describe a number of techniques that we proposed to alleviate the current lack of treatment of structure in the hex-meshing pipeline. In particular, I will introduce two techniques for the simplification and optimization of hex-mesh structure as a post-processing after the generation of initial valid all-hex meshes. Then, I will talk about two techniques we developed for hex-mesh generation with structure awareness. Finally, I will conclude the talk with a summary of the remaining challenges in order to achieve the robust and automatic structure-aware hex-meshing pipeline.

Bio:

Guoning Chen is an Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Houston. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Oregon State University in 2009. Before joining the University of Houston, he was a post-doctoral research fellow at the Scientific Computing and Imaging (SCI) Institute at the University of Utah. His research interests are in Data Visualization, Geometric Modeling, Geometry Processing, and Physically-based Simulations. He has published over 80 peer-reviewed papers, and his work has won a number of best paper awards and honorable mention awards. He has served on numerous paper committee for many top conferences in Visualization and Computer Graphics. He is the recipient of an NSF CAREER Award and a Junior Faculty Research Excellence Award from the College of Nature Science and Mathematics at the University of Houston.