Unfolding Method of Non-Developable Surface for Sheet-Metal Design

Abstract

The organized vertex coordination of the triangular surfaces is obtained by the meshing method in the 3D kernel based developing environment. To optimize the flattened form, the energy method is used to find the reasonable unfolding scheme, which seeks the solution to minimize the deforming energy generated when flattening the triangular surfaces. This algorithm is not the fastest one, but the versatile one especially for the non-developable surface with a large bending degree. With the unfolding method and the 3D kernel environment, the 3D unfolding system for the arbitrary surface satisfying the requirements is constructed.