A new method for quadrilateral surface mesh creation is presented. This method can mesh free-form surfaces which have been modelled within a Computer Aided Design (C. A. D.) software environment. Therefore, a surface is described by a set of bi-parametric patches either of NURBS (Non Uniform Rational B-Spline) or Bézier type. An initial mesh made up from triangular faces which map the surface model must be given as input of the method. The basic idea of the current method relies or1 the independence between geometric and topologic adaption treatments of a mesh. A first step creates quadrilateral elements by merging two adjacent triangles. Further topologic treatments produce the mesh which contain quadrilateral elements only. In order to produce a useful mesh for a structural analysis. new operators are set up for the optimization of mesh connectivities. At ally time, the position of nodes can he updated through a geometric operator allowing the nodes to slide over the whole surface. This last process is patch independent. To cope with quadrilateral faces. this operator has been adapted from the operator described by Noël & al. that was initially dedicated to triangular faces.

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