Designing for hot-blade cutting: Geometric Approaches for High-Speed Manufacturing of Doubly-Curved Architectural Surfaces

In this paper we present a novel method for the generation of doubly-curved, architectural design surfaces using swept Euler elastica and cubic splines. The method enables a direct design to production workflow with robotic hot-blade cutting, a novel robotic fabrication method under development by authors of the paper, which facilitates high-speed production of doubly-curved foam moulds.

Complementary to design rationalisation, in which arbitrary surfaces are translated to hot-blade-cuttable geometries, the presented method enables architects and designers to design directly with the non-trivial constraints of blade-cutting in a bottom-up fashion, enabling an exploration of the unique architectural potential of this fabrication approach.

The method is implemented as prototype design tools in MatLAB, C++, GhPython, and Python and demonstrated through cutting of expanded polystyrene foam design examples.