Adaptive smoothing techniques for 3-D unstructured meshes

To correctly capture the behavior of deforming material volumes in 3-D, the Los Alamos unstructured grid code X3D has access to a variety of moving mesh algorithms. The authors present two such algorithms which markedly differ in their computational complexity. The first algorithm, Moving finite Elements for Surfaces, has only 2-D computational complexity, in that they only solve for interface motions and obtain volume point motions through interpolation. The second algorithm, Minimum Error Gradient Adaption, has 3-D complexity, since the volume tetrahedral deformations must be computed. Naturally, the 3-D complexity algorithm can model realistically a larger class of physical problems than the lower complexity approach. They present examples in metallic grain growth and semiconductor process modeling