Enforcing essential boundary conditions on domains defined by point clouds

Abstract: This paper develops and investigates a new method for the application of Dirichlet boundary conditions for computational models defined by point clouds. Point cloud models often stem from laser or structured-light scanners which are used to scan existing mechanical structures for which CAD models either do not exist or from which the artifact under investigation deviates in shape or topology. Instead of reconstructing a CAD model from point clouds via surface reconstruction and a subsequent boundary conforming mesh generation, a direct analysis without pre-processing is possible using embedded domain finite element methods. These methods use non-boundary conforming meshes which calls for a weak enforcement of Dirichlet boundary conditions. For point cloud based models, Dirichlet boundary conditions are usually imposed using a diffuse interface approach. This leads to a significant computational overhead due to the necessary computation of domain integrals. Additionally, undesired side effects on the gradients of the solution arise which can only be controlled to some extent. This paper develops a new sharp interface approach for point cloud based models which avoids both issues. The computation of domain integrals is circumvented by an implicit approximation of corresponding Voronoi diagrams of higher order and the resulting sharp approximation avoids the side-effects of diffuse approaches. Benchmark examples from the graphics as well as the computational mechanics community are used to verify the algorithm. All algorithms are implemented in the FCMLab framework and provided at https://gitlab.lrz.de/cie_sam_public/fcmlab/. Further, we discuss challenges and limitations of point cloud based analysis w.r.t. application of Dirichlet boundary conditions.