Hua Tong, Yongjie Jessica Zhang
Automatically generating high-quality conforming hexahedral (hex) meshes from general input boundaries remains a challenging problem, despite the numerical advantages hex elements offer in simulation. Grid-based adaptive refinement, followed by hanging-node removal, is the most robust fully automatic choice. Among two-refinement methods, primal templates have better mesh quality than dual templates but depend on a strong balancing condition that over-refines the grid; neither family guarantees planar quadrilateral (quad) faces. This paper generalizes recent primal three-refinement templates to a two-refinement scheme under a moderate balancing condition, a relaxation of the strong one. 32 special and five fundamental patterns resolve all 144 symmetry-reduced configurations, followed by either a fast greedy algorithm or an integer linear programming (ILP) algorithm that trades extra runtime for a further reduction in element count. The scheme is the first two-refinement method in which all hexes have planar faces, and its meshes feed directly into a recent quality-guaranteed hex mesh reconstruction algorithm. At comparable element counts, it attains a similar Hausdorff ratio (HR) and a higher minimum scaled Jacobian (min SJ) than its three-refinement counterpart.