Corner blending of free-form N-sided holes

Geometric modeling requires constructing blends between surfaces to meet manufacturing specifications, reduce stress concentrations in designs, and enhance aesthetics. Industrial engineers may design parts using different surface types to satisfy design requirements. Surface blending integrates the diverse representations. Because most CAD/CAM software uses parametric representations for curves and surfaces, blending techniques for parametric surfaces are more urgently needed than methods for implicit surfaces. The authors discuss a new method for parametric surface blending. They apply their corner blending technique to three- to six-sided holes and discuss corner blending of three sided holes for three different cases, each presenting different blending challenges.