Mesh quality (.qual) files

Mesh quality is assessed at several points during mesh generation and improvement. Each time the quality is evaluated, each cell is queried to determine its quality.^3.2 The results are sorted into bins and a count kept for each bin. In addition, the overall maximum and minimum quality values are computed. After all quality values have been computed and binned, the count for each bin is divided by the total number of quality values; therefore, each bin has a value that represents the fraction of all quality values that fall within that bin.

When mesh quality statistics are written to a file, the quality measure used and the maximum and minimum quality for each evaluation are included at the top of the file in a format which is commonly ignored as a comment by plotting software. Each line after that contains the quality value at the center of a bin and the fraction of quality values that fell within that bin for each evaluation. An example of a mesh quality file is shown in Figure 3.7.

Figure 3.7: Example quality output file