Bundling elastic gridshells with alignable nets. Part I: Analytical approach

Abstract

Elastic gridshells (EGS) offer a cost-effective and rapid way to construct lightweight structures. This paper focuses on bundlable EGS, gridshells which may be deployed from a compact slender state, thus allowing for off-site fabrication. Some bundlable EGS have the additional property of being self-shaping, an aspect that simplifies considerably the erection phase. Despite recent research interest, there is still a lack of understanding of the design space of bundlable EGS, and a need for intuitive design tools for preliminary design phases – in particular for self-shaping EGS. Based on this observation, this article introduces alignable nets, shapes that inherently fulfill the metrical compatibility constraint of bundlability. This mathematical formulation allows to identify analytical shapes of bundlable EGS, which constitute very accessible design tools. In particular, surfaces of revolution appear to be a valuable tool for the conceptual design of self-shaping gridshells, as they may give instant feedbacks on the mechanical energy required for deployment – allowing notably to design structures that may be deployed with zero total external work.