299 research outputs found
Smooth quasi-developable surfaces bounded by smooth curves
Computing a quasi-developable strip surface bounded by design curves finds
wide industrial applications. Existing methods compute discrete surfaces
composed of developable lines connecting sampling points on input curves which
are not adequate for generating smooth quasi-developable surfaces. We propose
the first method which is capable of exploring the full solution space of
continuous input curves to compute a smooth quasi-developable ruled surface
with as large developability as possible. The resulting surface is exactly
bounded by the input smooth curves and is guaranteed to have no
self-intersections. The main contribution is a variational approach to compute
a continuous mapping of parameters of input curves by minimizing a function
evaluating surface developability. Moreover, we also present an algorithm to
represent a resulting surface as a B-spline surface when input curves are
B-spline curves.Comment: 18 page
Developable B-spline surface generation from control rulings
An intuitive design method is proposed for generating developable ruled
B-spline surfaces from a sequence of straight line segments indicating the
surface shape. The first and last line segments are enforced to be the head and
tail ruling lines of the resulting surface while the interior lines are
required to approximate rulings on the resulting surface as much as possible.
This manner of developable surface design is conceptually similar to the
popular way of the freeform curve and surface design in the CAD community,
observing that a developable ruled surface is a single parameter family of
straight lines. This new design mode of the developable surface also provides
more flexibility than the widely employed way of developable surface design
from two boundary curves of the surface. The problem is treated by numerical
optimization methods with which a particular level of distance error is
allowed. We thus provide an effective tool for creating surfaces with a high
degree of developability when the input control rulings do not lie in exact
developable surfaces. We consider this ability as the superiority over
analytical methods in that it can deal with arbitrary design inputs and find
practically useful results.Comment: 13 pages, 12 figrue
Limitations on the smooth confinement of an unstretchable manifold
We prove that an m-dimensional unit ball D^m in the Euclidean space {\mathbb
R}^m cannot be isometrically embedded into a higher-dimensional Euclidean ball
B_r^d \subset {\mathbb R}^d of radius r < 1/2 unless one of two conditions is
met -- (1)The embedding manifold has dimension d >= 2m. (2) The embedding is
not smooth. The proof uses differential geometry to show that if d<2m and the
embedding is smooth and isometric, we can construct a line from the center of
D^m to the boundary that is geodesic in both D^m and in the embedding manifold
{\mathbb R}^d. Since such a line has length 1, the diameter of the embedding
ball must exceed 1.Comment: 20 Pages, 3 Figure
Discrete Differential Geometry of Thin Materials for Computational Mechanics
Instead of applying numerical methods directly to governing equations, another approach to computation is to discretize the geometric structure specific to the problem first, and then compute with the discrete geometry. This structure-respecting discrete-differential-geometric (DDG) approach often leads to new algorithms that more accurately track the physically behavior of the system with less computational effort. Thin objects, such as pieces of cloth, paper, sheet metal, freeform masonry, and steel-glass structures are particularly rich in geometric structure and so are well-suited for DDG. I show how understanding the geometry of time integration and contact leads to new algorithms, with strong correctness guarantees, for simulating thin elastic objects in contact; how the performance of these algorithms can be dramatically improved without harming the geometric structure, and thus the guarantees, of the original formulation; how the geometry of static equilibrium can be used to efficiently solve design problems related to masonry or glass buildings; and how discrete developable surfaces can be used to model thin sheets undergoing isometric deformation
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