On increasing the developability of a trimmed NURBS surface

Developable surfaces are desired in designing products manufactured from planar sheets. Trimmed non-uniform rational B-spline (NURBS) surface patches are widely adopted to represent 3D products in CAD/CAM. This paper presents a new method to increase the developability of an arbitrarily trimmed NURBS surface patch. With this tool, designers can first create and modify the shape of a product without thinking about the developable constraint. When the design is finished, our approach is applied to increase the developability of the designed surface patches. Our method is an optimisation-based approach. After defining a function to identify the developability of a surface patch, the objective function for increasing the developability is derived. During the optimisation, the positions and weights of the free control points are adjusted. When increasing the developability of a given surface patch, its deformation is also minimised and the singular points are avoided. G(0) continuity is reserved on the boundary curves during the optimisetion, and the method to reserve G(1) continuity across the boundaries is also discussed in this paper. Compared to other existing methods, our approach solves the problem in a novel way that is close to the design convention, and we are dealing with the developability problem of an arbitrarily trimmed NURBS patch.