Gn-continuous connections between normal ringed surfaces Original Research Article

A ringed surface is a surface generated by sweeping a circle with non constant radius along a curve. The ringed surface is called normal if the circles are contained in the normal planes of the curve. The paper introduces a method for constructing Gn-continuous transition surfaces between two given normal ringed surfaces based on a recent Gn-blending method for parametric curves. Various design parameters give user the possibility to manipulate the solution. An advantage of the method is that there is no need for calculation of derivatives of the given ringed surfaces. For special cases implicit Gn-connection surfaces of several cylinders/cones are given. The implicit method is based on results on functional splines and can be extended to pipe surfaces with parametrically defined directrices.