Reduced surface point selection options for efficient mesh deformation using radial basis functions

Previous work by the authors has developed an efficient method for using radial basis functions (RBFs) to achieve high quality mesh deformation for large meshes. For volume mesh deformation driven by surface motion, the RBF system can become impractical for large meshes due to the large number of surface (control) points, and so a particularly effective data reduction scheme has been developed to vastly reduce the number of surface points used. The method uses a chosen error function on the surface mesh to select a reduced subset of the surface points; this subset contains a sufficiently small number of points so as to make the volume deformation fast, and a correction function is used to correct those surface points not included. Hence, the scheme is split such that both parts are working on appropriate problems. RBFs are an excellent way of finding smooth orthogonality preserving global deformations, but are less suitable for enforcing an exact geometry for a large number of points, while a simpler approach is ideal for diffusing small changes evenly but has quality (and possibly expense) drawbacks if used for the entire volume. However, alternatives exist for the error function used to select the reduced data set, so here a comparison is made between three different options: the surface error function, the unit function and the power function. Tests run on structured and unstructured meshes show that the surface error function gives the lowest errors, but this also requires a deformed surface shape to be known in advance of the simulation. The unit and power functions both avoid the need for a deformed surface, and the unit function is shown to be superior. (C) 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.