advanced building skins 14 | 15 June 2012 - lamp.tugraz.at - Graz ...

3 Adaptive Formwork
Advanced Building Skins
The adaptive formwork [Fig. 3] (mentioned in the organigram as A.6a) is built up of a rotatable frame
that is rasterized in orthogonal field of pins on both sides. These pins can be axial adjusted and fixed
serially by an industrial robot. A formwork facing that is connected to the pins covers the field and
flexible layered battens proof the border area.
Figure 3: Adjusting the pins Figure 4: Adjusted field of the first model
3.1 Digital Transformation into Physical Construction
To adjust the pins and realize the computer generated form, the geometrical information of any
segment has to be transferred. For this a script in “Rhinoceros-Grasshopper” was written [Fig. 5]. It
analyzes both surfaces, the top side and rear side, and breaks them up and rasterizes suitable for the
pin field. Then it calculates the traveling distance of every single pin and exports it as a vector in a list
[Fig. 7]. These vector files are transferred into a work step file for the robot. Because the current
model works on a thread based system, the file needs a number of revolutions to drive the formwork.
To avoid overstretching, a maximal accepted travelling distance per work step is specified, depending
on the flexibility of the form facing. Therefore another script controls the working cycle.
Figure 5: Grasshopper-file Figure 6: Implementation on a
segment
4 High Performance Materials for Shell Structures
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Figure 7: Resulting list
Additional to the development of new analysing tools and production processes, materials technology
has evolved too. Concrete technology as well as reinforcement provides new materials with a lot of
potential. So as a logical consequence in this project steel reinforced concrete is substituted by UHPC
(with or without steelfibres) and CFPR (Carbonfiber-Reinforced Polymers).
To prove their combined material performance, first tests were conducted and several are following.