A Large-Scale Comparison of Tetrahedral and Hexahedral Elements for Solving Elliptic PDEs with the Finite Element Method
In a surprising upset, quadratic tetrahedral elements performed similarly or better than hexahedral elements for a range of elliptic PDEs, particularly when considering the entire FEM pipeline from meshing to solving. This suggests that robust, automatic tetrahedral meshing, coupled with quadratic elements, can be a strong choice for many common simulation scenarios without sacrificing performance.