One of the difficult requirements imposed on fully automatic tetrahedral mesh generators has been the ability to produce "good" quality graded elements. This note is concerned with the choice of a distortion quality measure used in post-meshing activities such as (i) quality evaluation, and (ii) quality improvement of a finite element mesh consisting of a disjoint collection of tetrahedra. In that light it provides (i) a comparison of the fidelity of various existing tetrahedron quality measures to a set of distortion sensitivity tests, and (ii) a comparison of the computational expense of such measures. The topics of mesh generation and mesh quality improvement are not discussed.
V. N. Parthasarathy,C. M. Graichen,A. F. Hathaway. A comparison of tetrahedron quality measures[J]. Finite Elements in Analysis and Design,1994-01-01,15(3):255 - 261.