Zeus: surface modeling, surface grid generation, tetrahedral volume discretization

This paper describes an interactive aircraft surface engineering and grid g eneration system Zeus, that has been developed and one that has evolved wit h actual use over the last decade. Zeus is an interactive system for the de sign, specification and visualization of aircraft geometries. The package s upports surfaces defined in a number of representations including planes, s pheres, cylinders, bilinear surfaces, NURBS and triangulated surfaces. It i ncludes fairly sophisticated geometric editing and rendering operations. It derives its main strength from the fact that it includes a comprehensive s uite of tools for surface and volume grid generation and their visualizatio n. During these ten years of development, there have been a number of innov ative computational techniques and algorithms that have been devised, imple mented and tested. This paper is primarily about the Zeus system and these new innovative techniques. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserv ed.