The use of energy methods and variational principles is widespread in many fields of engineering of which structural mechanics and curve and surface design are two prominent examples. In principle many different types of function can be used as possible trial solutions to a given variational problem but where piecewise polynomial behaviour and user controlled cross segment continuity is either required or desirable, B-splines serve as a natural choice. Although there are many examples of the use of B-splines in such situations there is no common thread running through existing formulations that generalises from the one dimensional case through to two and three dimensions. We develop a unified approach to the representation of the minimisation equations for B-spline based functionals in tensor product form and apply these results to solving specific problems in geometric smoothing and finite element analysis using the Rayleigh-Ritz method. We focus on the development of algorithms for the exact computation of the minimisation matrices generated by finding stationary values of functionals involving integrals of squares and products of derivatives, and then use these to seek new variational based solutions to problems in the above fields. By using tensor notation we are able to generalise the methods and the algorithms from curves through to surfaces and volumes. The algorithms developed can be applied to other fields where a variational form of the problem exists and where such tensor product B-spline functions can be specified as potential solutions.

The use of energy methods and variational principles is widespread in many fields of engineering of which structural mechanics and curve and surface design are two prominent examples. In principle many different types of function can be used as possible trial solutions to a given variational problem but where piecewise polynomial behaviour and user controlled cross segment continuity is either required or desirable, B-splines serve as a natural choice. Although there are many examples of the use of B-splines in such situations there is no common thread running through existing formulations that generalises from the one dimensional case through to two and three dimensions. We develop a unified approach to the representation of the minimisation equations for B-spline based functionals in tensor product form and apply these results to solving specific problems in geometric smoothing and finite element analysis using the Rayleigh-Ritz method. We focus on the development of algorithms for the exact computation of the minimisation matrices generated by finding stationary values of functionals involving integrals of squares and products of derivatives, and then use these to seek new variational based solutions to problems in the above fields. By using tensor notation we are able to generalise the methods and the algorithms from curves through to surfaces and volumes. The algorithms developed can be applied to other fields where a variational form of the problem exists and where such tensor product B-spline functions can be specified as potential solutions.