Stress-Constrained Thickness Optimization for Shell Object Fabrication

AbstractWe present an approach to fabricate shell objects with thickness parameters, which are computed to maintain the user-specified structural stability. Given a boundary surface and user-specified external forces, we optimize the thickness parameters according to stress constraints to extrude the surface. Our approach mainly consists of two technical components: First, we develop a patch-based shell simulation technique to efficiently support the static simulation of extruded shell objects using finite element methods. Second, we analytically compute the derivative of stress required in the sensitivity analysis technique to turn the optimization into a sequential linear programming problem. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach can optimize the thickness parameters for arbitrary surfaces in a few minutes and well predict the physical properties, such as the deformation and stress of the fabricated object.