Interactive design and simulation of tubular supporting structure

•A system integrating design and simulation of freeform tube structures is presented•We provide an intuitive shape design mechanism to manipulate the geometry of tubes•We propose a two-level subspace simulation to enable fast analysis of tube structures

This paper presents a system for design and simulation of supporting tube structure. We model each freeform tube component as a swept surface, and employ boundary control and skeletal control to manipulate its cross-sections and its embedding respectively. With the parametrization of the swept surface, a quadrilateral mesh consisting of nine-node general shell elements is automatically generated and the stress distribution of the structure is simulated using the finite element method. In order to accelerate the complex finite element simulation, we adopt a two-level subspace simulation strategy, which constructs a secondary complementary subspace to improve the subspace simulation accuracy. Together with the domain decomposition method, our system is able to provide interactive feedback for parametric freeform tube editing. Experiments show that our system is able to predict the structural character of the tube structure efficiently and accurately.

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