Local transformations of hexahedral meshes of lower valence (Q425625)

Hexahedral meshes are widely used in many branches of computational physics. Their refinenment as well as their coarsening is, however, a delicate subject. It is proven that the hex flipping transformations after \textit{M. Bern, D. Eppstein} and \textit{J. Erickson} [``Flipping Cubical Meshes'', \url{arXiv:cs/0108020}] is the only possible local modification in hex meshes with less than five edges per vertex. A new transformation is shown to be able to handle meshes with less than six edges per vertex.