[Gmsh] Extrusion along a complex guiding path

[Christophe Geuzaine]

Lucas Blattner Martinho wrote:
> 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? 

It's not possible at the moment, but this is indeed something that could 
be useful... I'm adding it to our TODO list.

> If not, would an
> alternative way of building this shape exist?
> 

You could always define this e.g. in Catia and import the step file?

> 
> 
> Yours faithfully,
> 
> Lucas Blattner Martinho
> 
> 
> Laboratório de Eletromagnetismo Aplicado  - LMAG
> Escola Politécnica da Universidade de São Paulo
> São Paulo,  Brasil
> 
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> 
> 


-- 
Prof. Christophe Geuzaine
University of Liege, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
http://www.montefiore.ulg.ac.be/~geuzaine