SFF-Oriented Modeling and Process Planning of Functionally Graded Materials Using a Novel Equal Distance Offset Approach

This paper deals with the modeling and process planning of solid freeform fabrication (SFF) of 3D functionally graded materials (FGMs). A novel approach of representation and process planning of FGMs, termed as equal distance offset (EDO), is developed. In EDO, a neutral arbitrary 3D CAD model is adaptively sliced into a series of 2D layers. Within each layer, 2D material gradients are designed and represented via dividing the 2D shape into several sub-regions enclosed by iso-composition contours. If needed, the material composition gradient within each of sub-regions can be further determined by applying the equal distance offset algorithm to each sub-region. Using this approach, an arbitrary-shaped 3D FGM object with linear or non-linear composition gradients can be represented and fabricated via suitable SFF machines.Mechanical Engineerin

Optimized normal and distance matching for heterogeneous object modeling

This paper presents a new optimization methodology of material blending for heterogeneous object modeling by matching the material governing features for designing a heterogeneous object. The proposed method establishes point-to-point correspondence represented by a set of connecting lines between two material directrices. To blend the material features between the directrices, a heuristic optimization method developed with the objective is to maximize the sum of the inner products of the unit normals at the end points of the connecting lines and minimize the sum of the lengths of connecting lines. The geometric features with material information are matched to generate non-self-intersecting and non-twisted connecting surfaces. By subdividing the connecting lines into equal number of segments, a series of intermediate piecewise curves are generated to represent the material metamorphosis between the governing material features. Alternatively, a dynamic programming approach developed in our earlier work is presented for comparison purposes. Result and computational efficiency of the proposed heuristic method is also compared with earlier techniques in the literature. Computer interface implementation and illustrative examples are also presented in this paper

Stent implant follow-up in intravascular optical coherence tomography images

The objectives of this article are (i) to utilize computer methods in detection of stent struts imaged in vivo by optical coherence tomography (OCT) during percutaneous coronary interventions (PCI); (ii) to provide measurements for the assessment and monitoring of in-stent restenosis by OCT post PCI. Thirty-nine OCT cross-sections from seven pullbacks from seven patients presenting varying degrees of neointimal hyperplasia (NIH) are selected, and stent struts are detected. Stent and lumen boundaries are reconstructed and one experienced observer analyzed the strut detection, the lumen and stent area measurements, as well as the NIH thickness in comparison to manual tracing using the reviewing software provided by the OCT manufacturer (LightLab Imaging, MA, USA). Very good agreements were found between the computer methods and the expert evaluations for lumen cross-section area (mean difference = 0.11 ± 0.70 mm2; r2 = 0.98, P\ 0.0001) and the stent cross-section area (mean difference = 0.10 ± 1.28 mm2; r2 = 0.85, P value\ 0.0001). The average number of detected struts was 10.4 ± 2.9 per crosssection when the expert identified 10.5 ± 2.8 (r2 = 0.78, P value\0.0001). For the given patient dataset: lumen cross-sectional area was on the average (6.05 ± 1.87 mm2), stent cross-sectional area was (6.26 ± 1.63 mm2), maximum angle between struts was on the average (85.96 ± 54.23), maximum, average, and minimum distance between the stent and the lumen were (0.18 ± 0.13 mm), (0.08 ± 0.06 mm), and (0.01 ± 0.02 mm), respectively, and stent eccentricity was (0.80 ± 0.08). Low variability between the expert and automatic method was observed in the computations of the most important parameters assessing the degree of neointimal tissue growth in stents imaged by OCT pullbacks. After further extensive validation, the presented methods might offer a robust automated tool that will improve the evaluation and follow-up monitoring of in-stent restenosis in patients

Removing micromelody from fundamental frequency contours

In this paper we describe a new method to diminish microprosodic components of fundamental frequency contours by applying weight functions linked to microprosodically classified phone combinations. For vowel segments in obstruent environments our algorithm outperforms standard smoothing algorithms like Moving-Average filtering, Savitzky-Golay filtering or MOMEL in diminishing F0 variations related to microprosodic factors while retaining significant differences related to macroprosody

A tension approach to controlling the shape of cubic spline surfaces on FVS triangulations

We propose a parametric tensioned version of the FVS macro-element to control the shape of the composite surface and remove artificial oscillations, bumps and other undesired behaviour. In particular, this approach is applied to C1 cubic spline surfaces over a four-directional mesh produced by two-stage scattered data fitting methods

Approximation and geometric modeling with simplex B-splines associated with irregular triangles

Bivariate quadratic simplical B-splines defined by their corresponding set of knots derived from a (suboptimal) constrained Delaunay triangulation of the domain are employed to obtain a C1-smooth surface. The generation of triangle vertices is adjusted to the areal distribution of the data in the domain. We emphasize here that the vertices of the triangles initially define the knots of the B-splines and do generally not coincide with the abscissae of the data. Thus, this approach is well suited to process scattered data.\ud \ud With each vertex of a given triangle we associate two additional points which give rise to six configurations of five knots defining six linearly independent bivariate quadratic B-splines supported on the convex hull of the corresponding five knots.\ud \ud If we consider the vertices of the triangulation as threefold knots, the bivariate quadratic B-splines turn into the well known bivariate quadratic Bernstein-Bézier-form polynomials on triangles. Thus we might be led to think of B-splines as of smoothed versions of Bernstein-Bézier polynomials with respect to the entire domain. From the degenerate Bernstein-Bézier situation we deduce rules how to locate the additional points associated with each vertex to establish knot configurations that allow the modeling of discontinuities of the function itself or any of its directional derivatives. We find that four collinear knots out of the set of five defining an individual quadratic B-spline generate a discontinuity in the surface along the line they constitute, and that analogously three collinear knots generate a discontinuity in a first derivative.\ud Finally, the coefficients of the linear combinations of normalized simplicial B-splines are visualized as geometric control points satisfying the convex hull property.\ud Thus, bivariate quadratic B-splines associated with irregular triangles provide a great flexibility to approximate and model fast changing or even functions with any given discontinuities from scattered data.\ud An example for least squares approximation with simplex splines is presented