Isogeometric parametrization inspired by large elastic deformation

Abstract

The construction of volumetric parametrizations for computational domains is a key step in the pipeline of isogeometric analysis. Here, we investigate a solution to this problem based on the mesh deformation approach. The desired domain is modeled as a deformed configuration of an initial simple geometry. Assuming that the parametrization of the initial domain is bijective and that it is possible to find a locally invertible displacement field, the method yields a bijective parametrization of the target domain. We compute the displacement field by solving the equations of nonlinear elasticity with the neo-Hookean material law, and we show an efficient variation of the incremental loading algorithm tuned specifically to this application. In order to construct the initial domain, we simplify the target domain's boundary by means of an L²-projection onto a coarse basis and then apply the Coons patch approach. The proposed methodology is not restricted to a single patch scenario but can be utilized to construct multi-patch parametrizations with naturally looking boundaries between neighboring patches. We illustrate its performance and compare the result to other established parametrization approaches on a range of two-dimensional and three-dimensional examples.