3D hodge decompositions of edge- and face-based vector fields
Abstract
We present a compendium of Hodge decompositions of vector fields on tetrahedral meshes embedded in the 3D Euclidean space. After describing the foundations of the Hodge decomposition in the continuous setting, we describe how to implement a five-component orthogonal decomposition that generically splits, for a variety of boundary conditions, any given discrete vector field expressed as discrete differential forms into two potential fields, as well as three additional harmonic components that arise from the topology or boundary of the domain. The resulting decomposition is proper and mimetic, in the sense that the theoretical dualities on the kernel spaces of vector Laplacians valid in the continuous case (including correspondences to cohomology and homology groups) are exactly preserved in the discrete realm. Such a decomposition only involves simple linear algebra with symmetric matrices, and can thus serve as a basic computational tool for vector field analysis in graphics, electromagnetics, fluid dynamics and elasticity.
Additional Information
© 2019 Association for Computing Machinery. Partial funding for this work was provided by NSF grants DMS-1721024 and IIS-1900473, and Pixar Animation Studios. Rundong wishes to thank Jin Huang at Zhejiang University for hosting him during the final editing phase of this paper.Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 100260
- DOI
- 10.1145/3355089.3356546
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20191210-100906607
- DMS-1721024
- NSF
- IIS-1900473
- NSF
- Pixar Animation Studios
- Created
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2019-12-10Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-16Created from EPrint's last_modified field