TetGen: A Quality Tetrahedral Mesh Generator

(What does this figure mean?)

TetGen

A Quality Tetrahedral Mesh Generator and a 3D Delaunay Triangulator

Hang Si
Research Group: Numerical Mathematics and Scientific Computing
Weierstrass Institute for Applied Analysis and Stochastics (WIAS)
Mohrenstr. 39, 10117 Berlin, Germany
si(at)wias-berlin.de

Introduction

TetGen is a program to generate tetrahedral meshes of any 3D polyhedral domains. TetGen generates exact constrained Delaunay tetrahedralizations, boundary conforming Delaunay meshes, and Voronoi partitions. The following pictures respectively illustrate a 3D polyhedral domain (left), a boundary conforming Delaunay tetrahedral mesh (middle), and its dual - a Voronoi partition (right).

TetGen provides various features to generate good quality and adaptive tetrahedral meshes suitable for numerical methods, such as finite element or finite volume methods. For more information of TetGen, please take a look at a list of features.

TetGen is written in C++. It can be compiled into either a standalone program invoked from command-line or a library for linking with other programs. All major operating systems, e.g. Unix/Linux, MacOS, Windows, etc, are supported.

Download

TetGen (version 1.4.3, released on September 6, 2009, updated on January 19, 2011) is available as a .zip file (293k) or as a .tar.gz file (286k) . The downloaded package includes the C++ source code of TetGen, a README file, a LINCESE file, a makefile for compling, and an example file for testing. The user's manual can be downloaded separately at here (gzipped postscript or pdf format). It includes more detailed instructions for compiling and the usage of TetGen.

Please note that TetGen is free for research and non-commercial uses. For any commercial utilization, a commercial license is available upon request.

Documentation

The user's manual of version 1.4.1 (gzipped postscript or pdf format).
Release notes. What's new in version 1.4.3?
Features. What can TetGen do?
Compilation instructions.
Command line syntax and switches.
File formats. TetGen's input/output and supported file formats.
Programming interface.

TetView. Displays the input and output files of TetGen with various viewing options. Executable binaries of different platforms are freely available.
Example meshes. Pictures of some selected meshes generated by TetGen.

Acknowledgment

The development of TetGen is supported by Weierstrass Institute for Applied Analysis and Stochastics in the research group of Numerical Mathematics and Scientific Computing. The Pdelib project develops a collection of software components for solving non-linear partial differential equations including 2D and 3D mesh generators, (parallel) sparse matrix solvers, and scientific visualization tools, etc.

Hang Si
2011-01-19