Design strategies for gridshells with singularities

This article discusses design strategies to improve the mechanical behavior of elastic gridshells with singularities. The advantage of meshing with one or more singularity is to allow a wider range of surfaces to be meshed with equal-length, quadrilateral meshes, known as Chebyshev nets. However, the application of this meshing process will influence the fabrication and the mechanical behavior of the structures. The erection process is simulated by means of the dynamic relaxation method, bending the bars to their final position. This simulation shows that a facetted shape is found instead of a smooth surface. This deformed shape makes the structure softer under applied gravity load. Two strategies are investigated in this paper to enable the construction of gridshells with singularities. The first consists in extending the bars close to the singularities edge-lines to have a smother gridshell after the erection process. The second strategy applies post-tension cables to the patches to increase the local curvature in the faceted zones. Both strategies increase the stiffness and buckling load of the final structure.