Polyhedral meshes provide a balanced solution for complex mesh generation problems. They are relatively easy and efficient to build, requiring no more surface preparation than the equivalent tetrahedral mesh. They also contain approximately five times fewer cells than a tetrahedral mesh for a given starting surface. Multi-region meshes with a conformal mesh interface are allowed.
The polyhedral meshing model utilizes the an arbitrary polyhedral cell shape in order to build the core mesh. In STAR-CCM+, a special dualization scheme is used to create the polyhedral mesh based on an underlying tetrahedral mesh which is automatically created as part of the process. The polyhedral cells created typically have an average of 14 cell faces.
An example polyhedral core mesh is shown below:
The polyhedral core mesh density can be increased or decreased by using the volume mesh density factors. Volume sources can also be included to locally increase or decrease the mesh density based on a range of prescribed shapes.