Minimal Surface Wing Structure

Hey guys!

I am working on a internal structure for a wing. Trying to make it as light as possible, I thought it would make sense to work with minimal surface like in this article:

Already tried some things and obviously some challenges appear, so I´ll list my current steps and the questions at the end.

First there is the question of how you can want to achieve the surface. I found some mathematical definitions here, tried to create a surface with GH, but could only get a wavy shape (not a real expert yet with using mathematical equations in gh), see at the screenshot below.

So I decided to work with SubD of Meshes. Mesh+ has some useful components like the batwing surface, which work very well and can be applied on shapes to some degree:

However there is a serious issue: As can be seen in the screenshot above the Batwing component is being defined by the blue quad-surface and thus loses its accuracy to the wing surface.

So here are my questions:

  1. It would be awesome, if someone knew a more elegant way to create the geometry?
  2. A strategy through which the mesh/surface is adjacent with the wing structure.

Help/tips/insights would be very much appreciated!

p.s.:

I also tried elongating the mesh and splitting it with the wing structure in Rhino, which caused very ugly mesh egdes as can be seen below… Does someone know why this happens?

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May you kindly share the script for the minimal surface? looks suppeer elegant!

if you want this shape you can easily create it without equation
http://facstaff.susqu.edu/brakke/evolver/examples/periodic/batwing.html

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Have you taken a look at Crystallon plugin? It takes a unit cell and applies it in a voxelised representation of the geometry. I gave it a go:
MinimalSurfaceCrystallonWeaverBird.gh (94.7 KB)

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Check this Pufferfish example, has very fast array filling twisted boxes for morphing and uses parameter values for the initial array spacing so you can even use graphs if you want to create gradient type spacing.
bun


Pf_TwistedBoxArrayInGeometryPull.gh (343.5 KB)

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Awesome answers, thanks a lot!

Cheers

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