Development of a prototype for an advanced 3D mesh morphing tool for CAE applications

该项目的目标是开发一个用于计算机辅助工程(CAE)应用的高级3D网格变形工具的原型。Shaper将允许用户高效地重塑用于结构和流体动力学模拟的三维计算机模型，这些模型在航空航天、汽车和可再生能源行业的新产品设计阶段被广泛使用。Shaper将通过将经典变形技术与计算机图形学领域最近开发的创新算法相结合，提供一种新的网格变形方法。Shaper的一个关键方面将是其开放的体系结构：实现的网格变形技术完全独立于所使用的底层计算机模型，因此该产品将能够支持市场上任何可用的结构和计算流体动力学软件。事实上，通过使用公共应用程序编程接口，最终用户可以很容易地将软件集成到他们现有的工程设计程序中，这反过来将大大减少新产品的开发时间，从而降低项目成本。这对新产品的设计周期非常有利，特别是当项目的复杂性需要对初始设计进行计算密集型、耗时的迭代优化时。

The goal of the project is to develop a prototype for an advanced 3D mesh morphingtool—named Shaper—for computer-aided engineering (CAE) applications.Shaper will allow the user to efficiently re-shape and re-size three-dimensional computer models used for structural and fluid-dynamics simulations, which are extensively used during the design phase of new products in the aerospace, automotive and renewable energy industry.Shaper will provide a novel approach to mesh morphing by combining classic morphingtechniques with innovative algorithms recently developed in the computer graphics field, thus resulting in a more powerful tool than similar products already available in the market.A key aspect of Shaper will be its open architecture: the implemented mesh morphingtechniques are completely independent from the underlying computer model used and hence the product will be able to support any of the structural and computational fluid-dynamics softwares available on the market. In fact, through the use of public application programming interfaces, end users can easily integrate the software into their existing engineering designprocedure, which, in turn, will result in a significant reduction of the development time of a new product and hence of project costs. This is extremely beneficial to the design cycle of a new product, especially when the complexity of the project requires a computationally intensive, time-consuming, iterative optimisation of the initial design.