  We define essential and strongly essential triangulations of 3-manifolds, and
give four constructions using different tools (Heegaard splittings, hierarchies
of Haken 3-manifolds, Epstein-Penner decompositions, and cut loci of Riemannian
manifolds) to obtain triangulations with these properties under various
hypotheses on the topology or geometry of the manifold. We also show that a
semi-angle structure is a sufficient condition for a triangulation of a
3-manifold to be essential, and a strict angle structure is a sufficient
condition for a triangulation to be strongly essential. Moreover, algorithms to
test whether a triangulation of a 3-manifold is essential or strongly essential
are given.
