UNAMalla 6

A 2D block structured mesh generator in Julia

About UNAMalla

The name is a wordplay from the institution UNAM and mesh in spanish.

UNAMalla is a project developed by a workgroup of professors from four institutions:

  • National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM)

  • Michoacan University of Saint Nicholas of Hidalgo (Mexico)

  • Autonomous University of Coahuila (Mexico)

  • Institute of Cybernetics and Physics of Cuba

  • University of Havana (Cuba)

Our main research area is mesh generation. Specifically, we generate structured meshes on irregular plane regions. The corner stone is the minimization of a function which measures geometric properties of the cells over the interior mesh points[1] [2]. Using this idea, UNAMalla has developed a mesh generator system of the same name to mesh complex shapes.

Contact us at vanmc@ciencias.unam.mx

A short history

UNAMalla has generated structured meshes for more than thirty years. The system has improved its tools and capabilities over the years. Different versions and programming languages have been used.

The origin of UNAMalla system goes back to the year of 1989 when mesh generation was required to solve a deep water problem on the Havana bay. A program for MS-DOS was designed using FORTRAN 77, C and QUICKBASIC. In the following year, the first official version of UNAMalla was launched for MS-DOS.

Afterwards, UNAMalla were developed in MATLAB. Support for interactive boundary preprocessing and automatic mesh smoothing was added. Later, UNAMalla 4 and UNAMalla 5β were released in 2011 and 2014, respectively. Both versions are written in C++. These versions are interactive, fast and generate structured meshes for regions with irregular shape, and even on regions with holes.

UNAMalla 5β can generate structured meshes, however the mesh quality was an issue. Now, we incorporate our block structured meshing of [3] [4] in UNAMalla 6β to overcome this limitation. Moreover, we use our module EditBoundary.jl based on [5] to generate better polygonal approximations of the region boundary.

Recent Publications

[1] Barrera, P., González G. F., Domínguez, F.J. Robust Discrete Grid Generation on Plane Irregular Regions. USSR Comput. Math. Math. Phys. 43(6), 884–892 (2003). PDF
[2] Barrera P., Cortés J. J., González G. F., Domínguez F. J., Tinoco J. G. (2010). Smoothness and Convex Area Functionals Revisted, SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing. PDF
[3] Barrera P., Méndez, I. (2021). Parametrization of Plane Irregular Regions: A Semi-automatic Approach I. In: Garanzha, V.A., Kamenski, L., Si, H. (eds) Numerical Geometry, Grid Generation and Scientific Computing. Lecture Notes in Computational Science and Engineering, vol 143. Springer, Cham. PDF
[4] Barrera P., Méndez, I. Parametrization of 2D Complex Regions using UNAMalla 6: A Block Structured Mesh Generator. In: Garanzha, V.A., Kamenski, L. (eds) Numerical Geometry, Grid Generation and Scientific Computing. Lecture Notes in Computational Science and Engineering, Springer, Cham. (in press) PDF
[5] Barrera-Sánchez P., Méndez-Cruz, I., Guzmán-Macedo, M. R. (in press) A robust method for polygonal approximation by line simplification and smoothing. IEEE 2023 Mexican International Conference on Computer Science (in press) PDF

UNAMalla Workgroup

We are very grateful to all fellow participants for their collaboration in the project UNAMalla. As a result, the project has advanced to this new version.

Mexico Section

  • Barrera Sánchez, Pablo (Team Leader)
    pablobarrera@ciencias.unam.mx
    Homepage

  • Carreón Otañez, César

  • Cortés Aguirre, Javier J.

  • De la Cruz, Adriana

  • Domínguez Mota, Franciso J.

  • García Calvillo, Irma D.

  • García Cano, Gustavo A.

  • Gónzález Flores, Guilmer F.

  • Macedo, Miguel Raz (active)

  • Méndez Cruz, Iván (Web master)
    vanmc@ciencias.unam.mx

  • Madrid de la Vega, Humberto

  • Nolasco Estrada, Mario Rafael (active)

  • Ojeda Castañeda, Rina B.

  • Ramírez Galicia, Leticia A.

  • Rivera Hernandez, Adriana

  • Tinoco Ruiz, José G.

  • Vázquez Maison, Luis Alberto (active)

  • Velázquez Guerrero, Luis C.

  • Víquez Cano, Mónica Z.

  • Zavaleta Sánchez, Jorge

Cuba Section

  • Abelló Ugalde, Isidro A.

  • Castellanos Noda, J. Longina

  • Hernández Mederos, Victoria

  • Pérez Domínguez, Angel A.

CC BY-SA 4.0 UNAMalla. Last modified: January 20, 2024. Website built with Franklin.jl and the Julia programming language.