Topology recovery technique for complex freeform surface model after local geometry repair

Intersections and discontinuities commonly arise in surface modeling and cause problems in downstream operations. Local geometry repair, such as cover holes or replace bad surfaces by adding new surface patches for dealing with inconsistencies among the confluent region, where multiple surfaces meet, is a common technique used in CAD model repair and reverse engineering. However, local geometry repair destroys the topology of original CAD model and increases the number of surface patches needed for freeform surface shape modeling. Consequently, a topology recovery technique dealing with complex freeform surface model after local geometry repair is proposed. Firstly, construct the curve network which determine the geometry and topology properties of recovery freeform surface model; secondly, apply freeform surface fitting method to create B-spline surface patches to recover the topology of trimmed ones. Corresponding to the two levels of enforcing boundary conditions on a B-spline surface, two solution schemes are presented respectively. In the first solution scheme, non-constrained B-spline surface fitting method is utilized to piecewise recover trimmed confluent surface patches and then employs global beautification technique to smoothly stitch the recovery surface patches. In the other solution scheme, constrained B-spline surface fitting technique based on discretization of boundary conditions is directly applied to recover topology of surface model after local geometry repair while achieving G1 continuity simultaneously. The presented two different schemes are applied to the consistent surface model, which consists of five trimmed confluent surface patches and a local consistent surface patch, and a machine cover model, respectively. The application results show that our topology recovery technique meets shape-preserving and G1 continuity requirements in reverse engineering. This research converts the problem of topology recovery for consistent surface model to the problem of constructing G1 patches from a given curve network, and provides a new idea to model repairing study.