Date: 2016-09-22 00:00:00 +0000 UTCTags: Zurich, public, education, research, bending active, K2 Engineering, Grasshopper, 3d
AAG 2016
The fifth edition of the symposium “Advances in Architectural Geometry” was hosted by ETH Zurich from 9-13 September and was divided into two parts; two-day workshops covering different topics of ongoing research and a two-day conference with remarkable keynote speakers and paper presentations.
Format’s Cecilie Brandt-Olsen was part of the instructors’ team together with Daniel Piker (McNeel + Fosters & Partners) and Anders Holden Deleuran (CITA/KADK) hosting the workshop called “Calibrated and Interactive Modelling of Form-Active Hybrid Structures” (http://www.aag2016.ch/workshop-3/) .
Form-active hybrid structures are characterised by a system, which combines elements of low stiffness into a stronger whole. This is achieved by using elements/materials for what they are best suited at thus creating very light-weight and structurally transparent structures. Since the shape directly depends of the force flow, it is necessary to include a form-finding step to generate the actual geometry. The flexibility of these structures means that they undergo large deformations when subjected to external loads, which implies that it becomes crucial to account for geometric non-linearity during the analysis. In addition to this, the form-finding and analysis has a strong correlation and therefore need to be performed within the same software to avoid losing important information between the two stages. As a result, the existing design and analysis workflow is very cumbersome.
The research presented at the workshop offers the ability to analyse form-active hybrid structures in a much more interactive environment that encourages an informed exploration in the early design stage. It is centred around the physics constraint solver “Kangaroo2” developed by Daniel Piker, which is an ideal platform due to its improved stability with regard to handling high stiffness values and its solving strategy, which inherently deals with non-linear behaviour. Format has developed an extension called “K2Engineering” (https://github.com/CecilieBrandt/K2Engineering) , which calibrates the output to accurate structural behaviour. Both K2 and K2Engineering have been combined into one modelling pipeline developed by Anders Holden Delauran, which enables a smooth work flow between the modelling of the coarse geometry, form-finding, analysis and fabrication.