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The process of clipping a multi-material cell finds diverse applications across fields such as numerical simulations and computer graphics visualization.
Computational fluid dynamics problem often combines multiple materials with different physical properties. The interfaces between those materials may be a part of the solution and evolve in time and can be non-aligned with the mesh. When volume conservation is crucial, interface reconstruction methods are used to approximate such material interfaces. They involve multiple steps, one of which is the process known as clipping. Clipping consists of intersecting and cutting a given cell with a material interface (represented by a line or a plane), in a way that the resulting material polytopes are topologically valid (no inverted or degenerate shapes) and preserves the material volumes. It involves a few steps and relies on a correct and adequate representation of the polytope to be clipped. The process of efficient polytope clipping is an active topic of research, particularly for multicore central processing units (CPUs).
This research aims to develop a 2-dimensional (2D) clipping algorithm from the ground up by building on and refining on our previous methods for the graphics processing unit (GPU). The work includes adapting the algorithm to handle unstructured meshes, arbitrary line configurations, and specific corner cases. In addition to updating our previous clipping algorithm, the research also explores a range of optimization techniques aimed at improving performance in areas of the clipping algorithm that take them most time to execute.