Zeus: surface modeling, surface grid generation, tetrahedral volume discretization

This paper describes an interactive aircraft surface engineering and grid generation system Zeus, that has been developed and one that has evolved with actual use over the last decade. Zeus is an interactive system for the design, specification and visualization of aircraft geometries. The package supports surfaces defined in a number of representations including planes, spheres, cylinders, bilinear surfaces, NURBS and triangulated surfaces. It includes fairly sophisticated geometric editing and rendering operations. It derives its main strength from the fact that it includes a comprehensive suite of tools for surface and volume grid generation and their visualization. During these ten years of development, there have been a number of innovative computational techniques and algorithms that have been devised, implemented and tested. This paper is primarily about the Zeus system and these new innovative techniques. ( 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.