Due to its high structural efficiency and aesthetics, free-form grid structures have been widely used in various public structures. However, it is neither a convenient nor an obvious task for engineers to create a discrete grid on a free-form surface that manifests the architect’s intent. This paper presents an efficient design approach based on Coulomb's law to generate well-shaped and fluent grids for free-form grid structural design. In the method, nodes of the grid structure are considered to be interacting particles in an electric field and are added to the surface in a progressive way. The nodal position is determined by Monte Carlo simulation and the grid is generated by connecting the particles that are already in equilibrium. According to the different ways of adding particles, two variations of the method are introduced in this paper: point-based progressive method (PBPM), and curve-based progressive method (CBPM). Case studies are provided to demonstrate the effective execution of the proposed method. The results show that the proposed method can effectively avoid mapping distortion and generate grids with regular shape and fluent lines to meet the aesthetic requirements. Furthermore, the proposed method provides flexible control over the direction and size of the grid, which gives architects a more flexible choice.

由于其高结构效率和美观性，自由形式的网格结构已广泛用于各种公共结构中。但是，对于工程师来说，在自由曲面上创建一个离散的网格以体现建筑师的意图既不方便也不是显而易见的任务。本文提出了一种基于库仑定律的有效设计方法，可以生成形状良好且流畅的网格，用于自由形式的网格结构设计。在该方法中，网格结构的节点被认为是电场中的相互作用粒子，并以渐进方式添加到表面。通过蒙特卡洛模拟确定节点位置，并通过连接已经处于平衡状态的粒子生成网格。根据添加粒子的不同方法，本文介绍了该方法的两个变体：基于点的渐进方法（PBPM）和基于曲线的渐进方法（CBPM）。提供了案例研究来证明所提出方法的有效执行。结果表明，该方法可以有效避免映射失真，生成规则形状，线条流畅的网格，满足审美要求。此外，所提出的方法对网格的方向和大小提供了灵活的控制，这为建筑师提供了更灵活的选择。