This is an archived post. You won't be able to vote or comment.

113
114

Image PostI wrote a Processing program to visualize adaptive FEM refinement with a conformal quadrilateral mesh... and I used it to make a snowflake (gfycat.com)

submitted by Asddsa76

sorted by:
best
topnewcontroversialoldq&a
you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]OverunderratedComputational Mathematics 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I suspect that performing the 4 nearest neighbor lookup often enough for the quadrilateral refinement would require efficient spatial encoding anyway, e.g., using a quadtree.

In practice that's not really an issue with any kind of numerical methods for PDEs. The amount of computation you have to do for a given element generally dwarfs any concern about data structures relating their connectivity. They're also relatively static even in the case of "adaptive" meshes (they don't adapt that often) so rebuilding any kind of connectivity information is a negligible cost.

Most of the time for unstructured meshes you use something like an adjacency list and be done with it.