Yannick Masson

Chebyshev nets are coordinate systems on surfaces obtained by pure shearing of a planar domain. These nets are used in particular to model gridshells, an architectural construction which is well-known for its low environmental impact. The main issue when designing a gridshell is the lack of diversity of the accessible shapes. Indeed, although any surface admits locally a Chebyshev net at any point, the global existence for these coordinate systems is only possible for a restricted set of surfaces. The research for sufficient conditions ensuring the global existence of Chebyshev nets is still ongoing. A result achieved in this thesis is an improvement on these conditions. Since the improvement in this direction seems to be rather limited, we broaden the perspective by introducing Chebyshev nets with singularities. Our main result is the existence of a global Chebyshev net with conical singularities on any surface with total positive curvature less than 2π and with finite total negative curvature. Our proof is constructive, so that this method can be applied to practical cases. We have implemented a special instance of this algorithm in the software Rhinoceros and some discrete Chebyshev nets constructed using this method are presented.

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