Stability of Statics Aware Voronoi Grid-Shells

Tonelli D., Pietroni N., Puppo E., Froli M., Cignoni P., Amendola G., Scopigno R.

0915 Interdisciplinary Engineering  0912 Materials Engineering  Civil and Structural Engineering  Grid Shells  Civil Engineering  0905 Civil Engineering  Architectural geometry 

Grid-shells are lightweight structures used to cover long spans with few load-bearing material, as they excel for lightness, elegance and transparency. In this paper we analyze the stability of hex-dominant free-form grid-shells, generated with the Statics Aware Voronoi Remeshing scheme introduced in Pietroni et al. (2015). This is a novel hex-dominant, organic-like and non uniform remeshing pattern that manages to take into account the statics of the underlying surface. We show how this pattern is particularly suitable for free-form grid-shells, providing good performance in terms of both aesthetics and structural behavior. To reach this goal, we select a set of four contemporary architectural surfaces and we establish a systematic comparative analysis between Statics Aware Voronoi Grid-Shells and equivalent state of the art triangular and quadrilateral grid-shells. For each dataset and for each grid-shell topology, imperfection sensitivity analyses are carried out and the worst response diagrams compared. It turns out that, in spite of the intrinsic weakness of the hexagonal topology, free-form Statics Aware Voronoi Grid-Shells are much more effective than their state-of-the-art quadrilateral counterparts.

Source: Engineering structures 116 (2016): 70–82. doi:10.1016/j.engstruct.2016.02.049

Publisher: IPC Science and Technology Press,, Guildford , Regno Unito

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