A Slicing Algorithm for Triangular Meshes

In this paper a slicing procedure for extracting geometric informations about triangular meshes is presented. In manufacturing sculptured surfaces are often represented by triangular meshes. Errors in the mesh as gaps, holes and invalid triangles lead in planar sections to defective contour lines used as tool path in milling or rapid prototyping. The slicing procedure works on a polyhedral data structure containing topological informations which are transferred to the polygonal plane sections. Then an effective two dimensional algorithm is detecting invalid triangles and deliver new three dimensional informations for repairing the mesh. Discrete curvature values at mesh points are also computed and analysed with respect to shape characterization of the mesh. AMS Subject Classification: 68U07 [Computer-aided design], 65D18 [Computer graphics and computational geometry]