Abstract: A method of 3D tetrahedron mesh generation of geological bodies is proposed. Based on octree method, the method adopts tetrahedron as the encasing box instead of conventional cube to generate well-shaped tetrahedron meshes. Then, the boundary of the geological body of the tetrahedron meshes is recovered with the surface model generated by usual mining software. The optimization is required as the meshes at the boundary are often in non-uniform distribution and have non-ideal quality and there are some thin units which should be eliminated so as to form high quality tetrahedron meshes needed for finite element analysis.

Key words: Octree, tetrahedron, geological body, mesh, entity boundary