
The Airshell Prototype
This paper by Alessandro Liuti, Sofia Colabella, and Alberto Pugnale, presents the construction of Airshell, a small timber gridshell prototype erected by employing a pneumatic formwork.
A textile hybrid system is based upon a structural logic that generates form in the relationship between an elastic textile surface and the bending resistance of fiber-reinforced composite material. Such structures are always discretized as the materials are born of highly specialized manufacturing processes: weaving or knitting for manufacturing textiles and pultrusion for the production of the particular fiber-reinforced composite elements typically utilized in textile hybrid structures.
The research described in this paper by Sean Ahlquist, Ali Askarinejad, Rizkallah Chaaraoui, Ammar Kalo, Xiang Liu and Kavan Shah embeds properties of both elastic textile and bending-resistant composites within a single material structure. This is accomplished through a composite forming process which utilizes pre-stressed textiles integrated with isolated regions of stiffened material.
The design of material behavior is utilized in both the forming process and the implementation of the material system itself. By calibrating curing time and the influence of the pre-stressed textile, complex 3D forms are generated without the use of complex 3D formwork (preforms). The resulting material systems have an inherent textile hybrid nature while also, as composites, offer high degrees of flexure. A series of studies depict the potential in forming complex 3D surface structures, and utilizing the ductile nature as reconfigurable material systems.
This paper by Alessandro Liuti, Sofia Colabella, and Alberto Pugnale, presents the construction of Airshell, a small timber gridshell prototype erected by employing a pneumatic formwork.
In this paper by Gregory Charles Quinn, Chris J K Williams, and Christoph Gengnagel, a detailed comparison is carried out between established as well as novel erection methods for strained grid shells by means of FE simulations and a 3D-scanned scaled physical model in order to evaluate key performance criteria such as bending stresses during erection and the distance between shell nodes and their spatial target geometry.
In this paper by Frederic Tayeb, Olivier Baverel, Jean-François Caron, Lionel du Peloux, ductility aspects of a light-weight composite gridshell are developed.
In this paper by Julian Lienhard, Holger Alpermann, Christoph Gengnagel and Jan Knippers structures that actively use bending as a self forming process are reviewed.
Parametric Tools for Architects & Designers @2025
No account yet?
Create an Account