Assembly aware design and construction of masonry structures

Parallel Session 75, Shell Structures

Rison Prasad Karayil Thekkoot, Romain Mesnil, Jean-François Caron and Olivier Baverel (École des Ponts ParisTech) present their work on topology.

This study aims to design a topological interlocking structure which can be constructed without any formwork. According to studies, the cost of material and labour for formworks often consumes up to 50% of the total project cost. The construction industry, being one of the largest in the world economy with about 10 trillion USD spent every year, the losses in time and resources are gigantic. To tackle these issues we propose a study on topological interlocking geometries. First, we explored the possibilities of finding new or previously unknown interlocking geometries. Then, with the help of intuitive method and parametric design tools, we approximated these geometries to various simple forms that are suitable for autonomous construction (Construction which heavily depends on the computer- controlled processes). Secondly, we explored the potential use of burr puzzle (A burr puzzle is an interlocking puzzle consisting of notched elements) as the basic building block of interlocking structure and developed the standard method to generate any given geometry.

Watch their presentation "Assembly aware design and construction of masonry structures" from the Spatial Structures 2020/21 Conference.

Read the paper by accessing our conference proceedings. 📚 Use the link https://doi.org/10.15126/900337 to download your digital copy and let yourself be #inspired!

#IASS #IASS2020_21 #SpatialStructures #Architecture #Structures #Engineering #LightweightStructures #CivilEngineering #StructuralEngineering #Conference #Construction #computationaldesign #nextgeneration #parallelsessions #shellstructures #topology