Curvahedra #18
Description
Your name, department, and University
Colin Cotter, Imperial College, London
Name(s) and department(s) of anyone else relevant to this project
Edmund Harriss, University of Arkansas
Please write a brief description of the application area of project
Curvahedra is a paper modelling system that produces curved surfaces in 3D by connecting flat pieces of paper.
It is an interesting way to construct objects that minimise their curvature. We would like to have a computational modelling system to accompany it, to create new objects which could then be manufactured as architectural designs, mechanical devices, etc.
In previous undergraduate projects I have developed numerical approaches to minimising curvature of 2D surfaces subject to boundary conditions, implemented in Firedrake. We have something that works reasonably now, and would like to apply this to something closer to curvahedra, which would involve meshing a set of flat shapes and specifying their connectivities so that their curvature minimising surface can be computed.
Please describe the project.
This project will create a meshing software tool for this purpose, allowing the user to select a number of meshed flat figures and the rules for their connection. The code would be written in Python, describing the meshes as graphs that can be passed to Firedrake's mesh constructor. Meshing the figures themselves is elementary, since they would be simple shapes like rectangles etc; the more involved part is describing their connections in a "flexible" way.
What will be the outputs of this project?
An open source meshing tool. Perhaps some art!
Which programming language(s) will this project use?
Python
Links to any relevant existing software repositories, etc.
firedrakeproject.org but this will be a downstream user mostly.
Links to any relevant papers, blog posts, etc.
Make project public
- I understand that this project proposal will be public