Reconfigurable Modularity for shell structures
S.P. Negenman (TU Delft - Civil Engineering & Geosciences)
Max Hendriks – Mentor (TU Delft - Engineering Structures)
Mariana Popescu – Graduation committee member (TU Delft - Applied Mechanics)
Robin Oval – Graduation committee member (TU Delft - Applied Mechanics)
More Info
expand_more
Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download, forward or distribute the text or part of it, without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license such as Creative Commons.
Abstract
The building sector is a big sector that is very important for the global economy, but also has a big contribution to the greenhouse gas emission and production of construction waste. The building sector is responsible for about 37% of the global greenhouse gas emissions. In order to comply with the Paris Agreement on climate change, it is necessary to reduce the total emission of greenhouse gasses and the production of waste.
Modular construction is used for structural components, such as columns ,beams, and plates. However, it has not yet been implemented for shell structures. Shell structures are shape and material efficient, but often require unique formwork that is of one time usage, because of their complex geometries.
This research searches to improve the sustainability of shell structures by looking into the application of modular construction in this type of structures. With the use of the Goldberg-method a hexagon dominant pattern has been projected on a spherical dome structure. Creating a repeatable mesh pattern on the structural surface. Various segment sizes (N=4 till N=10) have been evaluated at the hand of a structural analysis in Grasshopper and Karamba3D. An uniform load, and a wind load have been used to obtain the stress distribution, displacement and buckling load factors for the different segment sizes.
It was found that smaller segments result in a more efficient force distribution, but larger segments have a lower labour intensity. From the analysis the optimal situation has been found at N=8, giving a balanced result between structural performance and labour intensity. With situation the difference in performance for different boundary conditions, and joint stiffness has been investigated. Here it was found that the segmentation of the shell lowers the buckling stability of a structure, but that modular construction is possible with different boundary conditions and even with the introduction of an oculus.
From the optimal situation N=8, 20 modules can be extracted. With the use of k-means clustering on the edges off the different modules, these modules can be further optimised. This leads to a adjusted set of 16 modules, with only 6 different module edges. The optimised modules have a higher potential for more configurations.
The results show that modular construction is possible within shell structures without compromising the structural integrity. It also results in a set of modules that can potentially be used in different configura-tions and across different structures. With this the research contributes to a more sustainable and circu-lar construction approach for shell structures.