[Gmsh] Extrusion along a complex guiding path

[Lucas Blattner Martinho]

Dear Gmsh developers and users,



I am trying to build the volume of  a hanging transmission line
conductor with Gmsh. The conductor should be a solid cylinder of
parallel circular faces with its lenght twisted in the shape of a
catenary.

The approach that I first considered was:

1) Create evenly spaced points in a direction, each of them with
appropriate height, so that they describe the catenary's shape.

2) Build a Spline through these points.

3) Extrude a circular surface through the path given by the Spline,
generating the desired volume.


However, I have checked Gmsh's documentation and noticed that
extrusion is only possible through a combination of translations along
straight lines and rotations around an axis.

Isn´t it possible to extrude a surface using more complex line shapes
(other than a straight line) as a guiding path? If not, would an
alternative way of building this shape exist?



Yours faithfully,

Lucas Blattner Martinho


Laboratório de Eletromagnetismo Aplicado  - LMAG
Escola Politécnica da Universidade de São Paulo
São Paulo,  Brasil