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LATEST MESH GENERATION ACTIVITIES FOR SABLAM OPERATIONAL SYSTEM

    The generation of FE computational meshes has always been a concern. The reason for this concern was the lack of a mesh generation tool with the following characteristics:

• Easy to use
• Reliable
• Consistent

    The development of BatTri as a tool to generate a finite element mesh of linear triangles has provided some degree of satisfaction to those requirements. BatTri was developed by Ata Bilgili and Keston Smith as "a graphical Matlab interface to the C language two-dimensional quality grid generator Triangle developed by Jonathan Richard Schewchuk. BatTri does the mesh editing, bathymetry incorporation and interpolation, provides the grid generation and refinement properties, prepares the input file to Triangle and visualizes and saves the created grid." (From BatTri 2D FE GRID GENERATOR by Ata Bilgili and Keston Smith). The latest version of BatTri can be downloaded from http://www-nml.dartmouth.edu/Software/battri

    As part of the SABLAM project a need to generate a series of meshes that resolve the estuarine system of the coast of Georgia and South Carolina. As part of this effort the meshes that were generated are "empanada"  and "banana3". (See attached figures). This effort follows the work done by Keston Smith on the generation of the "peach" series of meshes. The difficulty that those meshes presented is the large number of computational nodes that were used. Using the same bottom topography database, the Coastal Relief Model bathymetry database, a new series of meshes is provided.
 

    banana3ll

 

    empanada

    Empanada is a subsample of banana3. Banana3 is being inserted in the big ADCIRC mesh (ec2001) and some test runs are going to be made on the resulting mesh.
Empanada is our best option as of now for an operational mesh. Brian Blanton has been doing some test on both meshes and the results are similar to the effects detected with the "peach" series.