A survey and comparison of traditional piecewise circular approximations to the ellipse Original Research Article

Due to their simplicity and ease of handling quadrarcs have been used to provide a piecewise circular approximation to ellipses for many hundreds of years. Like biarcs there are many possible criteria for choosing joint positions between the arcs. This paper provides an algebraic formulation of 10 of these quadrarc constructions. For a range of ellipse eccentricities these quadrarcs are assessed quantitatively in terms of Euclidean distance error and tangent discontinuity.