Smoothing is one of the basic procedures for improvement of mesh quality. In this paper, a novel and efficient smoothing approach for planar and surface mesh based on element geometric deformation is developed. The presented approach involves two main stages. The first stage is geometric deformation of all the individual elements through a specially designed two-step stretching-shrinking operation (SSO), which is performed by moving the vertices of each element according to a certain rule in order to get better shape of the element. The second stage is to determine the position of each node of the mesh by a weighted average strategy according to quality changes of its adjacent elements. The suggested SSO-based smoothing algorithm works efficiently for triangular mesh and can be naturally expanded to quadrilateral mesh, arbitrary polygonal mesh, and mixed mesh. Combined with quadratic error metric (QEM), this approach may be also applied to improve the quality of surface mesh. The proposed method is simple to program and inherently very suitable for parallelization, especially on graphic processing unit (GPU). Results of numerical experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and potential of this method.

Mesh quality can affect both the accuracy and efficiency of numerical solutions. This paper first proposes a geometry-based smoothing and untangling method for 2D meshes based on explicit element geometric transformation and element stitching. A new explicit element geometric transformation (EEGT) operation for polygonal elements is firstly presented. The transformation, if applied iteratively to an arbitrary polygon (even inverted), will improve its regularity and quality. Then a well-designed element stitching scheme is introduced, which is achieved by carefully choosing appropriate element weights to average the temporary nodes obtained by the above individual element transformation. Based on the explicit element geometric transformation and element stitching, a new mesh smoothing and untangling approach for 2D meshes is proposed. The proper choice of averaging weights for element stitching ensures that the elements can be transitioned smoothly and uniformly throughout the calculation domain. Numerical results show that the proposed method is able to produce high-quality meshes with no inverted elements for highly tangled meshes. Besides, the inherent regularity and fine-grained parallelism make it suitable for implementation on Graphic Processor Unit (GPU).