All you need is rotation: Construction of developable strips

Abstract

We present a novel approach to generate developable strips along a space curve. The key idea of the new method is to use the rotation angle between the Frenet frame of the input space curve, and its Darboux frame of the curve on the resulting developable strip as a free design parameter, thereby revolving the strip around the tangential axis of the input space curve. This angle is not restricted to be constant but it can be any differentiable function defined on the curve, thereby creating a large design space of developable strips that share a common directrix curve. The range of possibilities for choosing the rotation angle is diverse, encompassing constant angles, linearly varying angles, sinusoidal patterns, and even solutions derived from initial value problems involving ordinary differential equations. This enables the potential of the proposed method to be used for a wide range of practical applications, spanning fields such as architectural design, industrial design, and papercraft modeling. In our computational and physical examples, we demonstrate the flexibility of the method by constructing, among others, toroidal and helical windmill blades for papercraft models, curved foldings, triply orthogonal structures, and developable strips featuring a log-aesthetic directrix curve.