T-MESHES AND T-SPLINE MODELLING FOR FREE-FORM SHAPE REPRESENTATIONS AND ISOGEOMETRIC ANALYSIS

Abstract

Nowadays, Isogeometric Analysis has become an effective alternative to traditional Design to Analysis process which uses the same geometry standard both for Design and Analysis purposes. However, NURBS, currently used in Isogeometric Analysis standard, has the limitation of rectangular topology, which results in many superfluous control points. Such points increase the computation time of simulation processes. Moreover, complex object models are composed of a number of NURBS patches, and thus, the designer has to spend time to revise the connectivity between the surfaces. Recently, T-splines surface was explored to overcome the limitations of NURBS. This paper provides the analysis of T-spline implementation in Isogeometric Analysis. It starts from mathematical definition of NUBRS and T-splines, then it describes implementation of T-splines in Rhino and provides the developed program which defines T-mesh parameters.