Tensile Structures

After working a little bit with textiles on the tensegrity project, I wanted to investigate the subject further. Peter had been working with textiles for an emergency tent project and also wanted to know more about these kinds of structures. So we teamed up for the final year project on the bachelor programme in Architectural Engineering at DTU.

The shape of tensile structures cannot be dictated - it must be found in a formfinding process where equilbrium is assured in the whole structure. We used a numerical Formfinding method called Dynamic relaxation which is based on the equations of motion. We wanted to create a small parametric design tool in MATLAB, which was able to find the shape of a cablenet structure with any given geometric and statical boundary conditions. Feel free to contact me to recieve the programcode. The design tool works pretty well and can perform a simple static analysis with a given load. To visualize the output of the program, we imported a geometry in to AutoCAD. This was done using a small LISP program and required a bit of "handwork". Flattening a triangulated surface was done manually in AutoCAD and was quite time consuming, but resulted in a cutting pattern which was used to build a paper model.