Design and Fabrication of Elastic Geodesic Grid Structures

Stefan Pillwein, Johanna Kübert, Florian Rist, Przemyslaw Musialski

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

6 Scopus citations

Abstract

Elastic geodesic grids (EGG) are lightweight structures that can be easily deployed to approximate designer provided free-form surfaces. In the initial configuration the grids are perfectly flat, during deployment, though, curvature is induced to the structure, as grid elements bend and twist. Their layout is found geometrically, it is based on networks of geodesic curves on free-form design-surfaces. Generating a layout with this approach encodes an elasto-kinematic mechanism to the grid that creates the curved shape during deployment. In the final state the grid can be fixed to supports and serve for all kinds of purposes like free-form sub-structures, paneling, sun and rain protectors, pavilions, etc. However, so far these structures have only been investigated using small-scale desktop models. We investigate the scalability of such structures, presenting a medium sized model. It was designed by an architecture student without expert knowledge on elastic structures ordifferential geometry, just using the elastic geodesic grids design-pipeline. We further present afabrication-process for EGG-models. They can be built quickly and with a small budget.
Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationSymposium on Computational Fabrication
PublisherACM
ISBN (Print)9781450381703
DOIs
StatePublished - Nov 5 2020

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