I've been giving a bit of thought (and revealing a lot of ignorance) to the idea of generating the wavy 'pillars' (which is what the vertical membranes between the layers of a phragmocone are called) with the RepRap machine. The shap is quite intrigueing and looks rather fractal. The insertion of the membrane on the sheet which separates the layers is very wavy with lots of tight curves. These curves become less severe further up the membrane until it becomes relatively smoothly curving. I've put some pictures of this on my university site (http://people.bath.ac.uk/ensjfvv/cuttlebone/). The three images 15, 19 and 21 are plan views of the pillars/membrane as just described, image 20 is a side view showing the pillars between the layers.
It seems to me that the maths for defining such a membrane, going from wiggly to smooth, ought to be fairly easy to do (i.e. not many lines of code) but I don't know how to do it. Do you? the membrane would then need to be sliced so that it could be produced as layers on the RepRap.
Please help!
Julian Vincent
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