VOLMOD

The needs of modern processes such as additive manufacturing or gigacasting in automotive industry, surpass the current CAD (Computer-aided Design) technology, which is based exclusively on B-reps (boundary representation) using bivariate splines and has been the industrial standard for several decades. VOLMOD is challanging the established approach and proposes a paradigm shift towards a volumetric modeling. In the relatively new approach of isogeometric analysis, volumes are a topic of research, but the developments remain in a low technology readiness level.

The ambition of VOLMOD is to rethink a full design and simulation pipeline by means of pure hexahedral topology smooth volume represenations (SV-reps). Three main challenges are in place : First, the generation of smooth volume descriptions of complex shapes; second, the efficient reconstruction of volumetric models from scattered data , and, thirdly, the development of volumetric unstructured splines that are suitable for analysis.