Formfindung und Potential beanspruchungsadaptiver Faltungen

• Form finding and potential of stress adapted foldings

Musto, Juan; Trautz, Martin (Thesis advisor); Kobbelt, Leif (Thesis advisor)

Aachen : RWTH Aachen University (2022, 2023)
Dissertation / PhD Thesis

Dissertation, Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen, 2022

Abstract

Folding is a highly effi cient design principle with a relatively high load-bearing capacity using a small amount of material. In construction respectively steel construction,the use of folding’s is limited to the conventional longitudinal folds of thin-walled, fl at semi-finished products, which rely on hierarchically structured secondary structures such as trapezoidal sheets, Z-profi les, etc. Employing space folds, which combine point folds (pyramidal folds) with another structural layer, self-supporting folds canbe realized. The examples of such spatial folds are characterized by a regular folding pattern resulting from tessellation of geometry with regular primitive surfaces (triangles and quadrilaterals). In this research it is demonstrated that the effi ciency of such a light weight structure is improved when, instead of a regular and geometrically derived folding pattern, the folding pattern is designed according to stresses. For this purpose, a form finding process is proposed that derives a folding pattern based on a surface tessellation according to the principal stress directions. With the parameterization based mesh generation algorithm, a trajectory mesh is calculated,in which the mesh edges are adapted in their orientation and density to the direction and intensity of the principal stresses of a structural system. A comparison of the load bearing capacity of a folding structure, where the folding pattern is designed according to geometric principles with a corresponding folding pattern based on the developed trajectory network, shows that the stress-adaptivefolding requires significantly less material to carry the same load. In addition, it is characterized by a significantly stiff er structural behavior, as it presents itself with lower deformations, despite the lower material input.

Institutions

• Chair of Structures and Structural Design [211110]