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This dissertation, "Minimum Bounding Boxes and Volume Decomposition of CAD Models" by Chi-keung, Chan,, was obtained from The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong) and is being sold pursuant to Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License. The content of this dissertation has not been altered in any way. We have altered the formatting in order to facilitate the ease of printing and reading of the dissertation. All rights not granted by the above license are retained by the author. Abstract: Abstract of thesis entitled "Minimum bounding boxes and volume decomposition of CAD models" Submitted by Chan, Chi Keung for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at The University of Hong Kong in February 2003 The prototyping of a large-sized model is essential in the manufacture of household appliances and automobile parts. However, most of the available layered prototyping methods, such as STL (Stereolithography), SLS (Selective Laser Sintering), FDM (Fused Deposit Modeling) and LOM (Laminated object Manufacturing), are limited by the building chamber size of the machines. Decomposing a large model into smaller constituent components and subsequently assemble them provides a way to overcome this limitation. A full-scale physical prototype of a large design can then be produced from a relatively small prototyping machine. In this research, several algorithms relevant to the decomposition process are developed. They provide either new or alternative solutions to the corresponding problems. These algorithms are for determining the ''minimum bounding box of a solid model'', ''putting a model into a cylindrical bounded volume'' and ''assembly feature generation''. To accelerate the computational process for complex models, an algorithm for ''determining the extreme points in a large 3D point set'' is presented. Integration of the above algorithms gives the final proposed decomposition algorithm. The algorithm for minimum bounding box determination is based on s