Advances in Mechanical Engineering (Apr 2020)

Modeling technology of curved surface development for puffer fish

  • Honggen Zhou,
  • Jie Cui,
  • Guizhong Tian,
  • Yesheng Zhu,
  • Changfeng Jia

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1177/1687814020916025
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 12

Abstract

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The drag reduction mechanism of puffer epidermis was closely related to its real geometry. In order to solve the modeling problem of epidermal spines on the puffer surface, a modeling method for the expansion of puffer shape was proposed. The three-dimensional scanning and non-uniform rational B-spline surface modeling technology was used to reconstruct the puffer model. According to the curvature characteristics, the surface mathematical equations including exponential, logarithmic, and sinusoidal functions were established based on the multinomial function. The surface was generated by a mathematical equation, and the surface was divided into several non-uniform rational B-spline patches according to curvature. After discretization, the point cloud Gaussian curvature and average value were calculated based on the implicit equation of moving least square surface, and whether the surface is approximately extensible or not was judged. Finally, the puffer surface was divided into 46 curved patches. In this article, the surface expansion algorithm gave priority to ensure the area unchanged, and four feature surfaces were selected according to the epidermal spines arrangement of the puffer surface. The results showed that the technique can simply and efficiently unfold the curved surface of the puffer fish, thus the mapping relationship between the epidermal spines on the surface and the plane was determined, which established a foundation for the accurate arrangement and modeling of the epidermal spines on the surface.