Abstract: Based on engineering application requirements and the state of the art of component layout design, a new layout modeling method is proposed in this article by introducing the “spheretrees” concept into 3D component layout design problems. This method employs the approximation concept of the finitesphere method (FSM) rather than the real configuration of the components to provide a unified description of irregular configurations of any 3D component in the packing design. Such an approximation transforms the original problem into a basic packing problem of components with sphere shapes. This makes it possible to carry out the interference computing between components of arbitrary configurations in a systematic way. Some typical numerical examples are considered. The proposed layout modeling method is shown to be suitable when it is applied together with the sequential quadratic programming (SQP) optimization algorithm to solve the design problems under consideration.

Key words: optimization design, 3D component layout, finite-sphere method, irregular shape, envelope sphere