Bundling elastic gridshells with alignable nets. Part II: Form-finding

Abstract

This two-part article introduces the concept of alignable nets, forms of elastic gridshells which may be deployed from a compact bundle state, thus offering advantages for transportation and prefabrication. Whereas the first part focused on analytical solutions, this second tackles their numerical form-finding. A design workflow is introduced to design a bundlable gridshell with a target surface and boundaries as inputs. Contrary to most other algorithms on irregular gridshells, the method does not simulate the deployment kinematics, but rather ensures the deployability by a simple local constraint derived from equations of scissor linkages. It turns out that the design space is significantly larger than the one of regular Chebychev gridshells with constant node spacing, hence allowing to further optimize a given gridshell geometry for other constructive aspects. The method is validated on several examples, prototypes and commercialized structures.