The spatial shape representation and 3D modeling of special-shape spring

Abstract

The solid modeling of special-shape spring is important to improve production efficiency of spring coiler. However, how to describe and represent its spatial shape is difficult because there is various special-shape spring with complex spatial shape. Consequently, the 3D modeling and visualization of special-shape spring is not easy to implement. The paper presents a solution to this problem. First, we extract four kinds of elementary shape feature and define their data structure respectively using feature technology. The special-shape spring may regarded as the combination of different elementary shape features. The dynamic linked lists are employed to record the position relation between them. Then, this article studies the 3D modeling methods of special-shape spring based on OpenGL. The emphasis is the discretization of the spring solid surface. Last, the high reality solid modeling is created with C++ Builder. © 2006 International Federation for Information Processing.