Building elastic gridshells from patches – P. Marquis et al. (2017)

To be able to build elastic gridshells, it is necessary to define and build the flat grids that will be deformed into the final 3D shapes. For complex topologies, this flattening is not possible without separating the grid into independent sub-grids which will subsequently be assembled. The purpose of the proposed paper is therefore the investigation of such construction from patches. A systematic study of various strategies for patch cutting by grid offset is presented on a toroidal form. The different propositions are analyzed in terms of their influence on the final form, on the forces in the connectors, and on the equivalent flat area of the patches. A discussion on the way to deal with short beams generated by the method closes the study.