Design and Tessellation of B-Spline Developable Surfaces

Abstract

Developable surfaces are widely used in various engineering applications. However, little attention has been paid to implementing developable surfaces from the onset of a design. The first half of the paper describes a user friendly method of designing developable surfaces in terms of a B-Spline representation whose two directrices lie on parallel planes. The second half of the paper investigates a new method for development and tessellation of such B-Spline developable surfaces, which is necessary for plate cutting and finite element analysis.