Problem

Modern CAD-Systems supply substantial functions for the design and modeling of laminar products. These are mostly integrated in CAD-Systems as parts of specific modeling environments, e.g. for special manufacturing methods like deep drawing or special applications like aerospace engineering.

Laminar products with branched structures are manufactured by deep drawing of bifurcated sheet metal stringers. These exhibit a complex structure of free-form faces from deep drawing operations and bifurcations from bend splitting.

Combinations of laminar structures and bifurcations are not yet supported by 3D modeling environments.

Objectives

Although the representation and presentation of laminar products with bifurcations in CAD-Systems with conventional modeling methods like CSG and Sweep-Modeling are conceivable, they do not fulfill the specific requirements on modeling and design of areal bifurcated sheet metal products.

The scientific approach within this project is to define new methods and tools for the geometric modeling of laminar bifurcated sheet metal products based on solution trees of mathematical optimization.