Medial Zones: Foundations and Engineering Applications

内侧区域：基础和工程应用

• 批准号: 1200089
• 负责人: Horea Ilies
• 金额: $ 37.5万
• 依托单位: University of Connecticut
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2012
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2012-09-01 至 2016-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1200089&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Medial; Zones; Foundations; Engineering; Applications

The research objective of this award is to develop a fundamentally new approach to understand and establish spatial properties of mechanical parts in terms of simple interacting constructs related to part functionality and manufacturing processes. In the context of engineering design, the novel concept of a medial zone provides an explicit representation of the correspondence between mechanical/functional characteristics and spatial properties. More precisely, medial zones provide topologically valid and parameterized initial design solutions. Due to the fact that the medial zones fuse some of the critical geometric and topological properties of both the domain itself and of its medial axis, reformulating problems in terms of medial zones affords the ?best of both worlds? in a variety of applications such as shape synthesis in conceptual design, robotic and autonomous navigation, and design automation. If successful, the results of this research will provide the first combinatorial model of a part that can be used to explicitly represent the correspondence between mechanical/functional characteristics of shapes and their spatial properties. This, in turn, provides a powerful paradigm for automatically synthesizing topologically correct, and functionally valid mechanical designs. Furthermore, this new framework will stimulate critical new avenues of interdisciplinary research at UConn and beyond. The intuitive nature of geometric skeletons will be used as a vehicle to illustrate non-intuitive engineering behavior during targeted outreach activities to K-12 students, teachers and local school district serving groups that have traditionally been underrepresented in engineering.

该奖项的研究目标是开发一种全新的方法，根据与零件功能和制造工艺相关的简单交互结构来理解和建立机械零件的空间特性。在工程设计的背景下，中间区域的新颖概念提供了机械/功能特性与空间属性之间对应关系的明确表示。更准确地说，中间区域提供了拓扑有效且参数化的初始设计解决方案。由于内侧区域融合了域本身及其内侧轴的一些关键几何和拓扑特性，因此根据内侧区域重新表述问题提供了“两全其美”的方案。适用于各种应用，例如概念设计中的形状合成、机​​器人和自主导航以及设计自动化。如果成功，这项研究的结果将提供第一个零件组合模型，可用于明确表示形状的机械/功能特征与其空间属性之间的对应关系。这反过来又为自动合成拓扑正确且功能有效的机械设计提供了强大的范例。此外，这个新框架将激发康涅狄格大学及其他地区跨学科研究的重要新途径。在针对 K-12 学生、教师和当地学区服务团体（传统上在工程领域代表性不足）的有针对性的外展活动中，几何骨架的直观性质将被用作展示非直观工程行为的工具。