CONSTRUCTION OF B-SPLINE APPROXIMATIONS FOR USE IN NUMERICAL GRID GENERATION

Grid generation is concerned with discretizing surfaces and volumes in 3D space. The original surfaces defining a geometry might be given as a finite set of triangles/quadrilaterals (discrete form) or as parame trically defined surfaces (analytical form). A new interactive techniq ue is presented for computing a B-spline approximation for geometries given in either form. The method requires user interaction for the sel ection of subsets of the given surfaces to be approximated. Once all s ubsets of surfaces have been approximated by B-spline surfaces, these are united yielding an overall C-2 continuous approximation.