Abstract
In two dimensional mechanical design analysis, quadrilateral element mesh is preferred because it provides more accurate result than triangular element mesh. However, automation of quadrilateral element mesh generation is much more complex because of its geometrical complexities. In this study, an automatic quadrilateral element mesh generation algorithm based on the boundary normal offsetting method and the boundary decomposition method is developed. In so doing, nodes are automatically placed using the boundary normal offsetting method and the decomposition method is applied to decompose the designed domain into a set of convex subdomains. The generated elements are improved by relocation of the existing nodes based on the four criteria - uniformity, aspect ratio, skewness and taper degree. The developed algorithm requires minimal user inputs such as boundary data and the distance between nodes.
