Spherical dome: design, digital twin manufacturing, and testing of a glubam structure

ABSTRACT

Domes are common architectural elements in real life, with spherical or sphere-like shapes being the most common. Nonetheless, there has been limited research on incorporating modern design and manufacturing technologies into spherical domes, especially those made of bio-based materials. This paper presents a comprehensive study of the design pipeline for spherical domes. In terms of spherical tessellation for dome design, a set of innovative algorithms and programs is made available as open-source resources, comprising both manual and numerical approaches, where the numerical approaches are validated by existing results while also expanding these results, and new manual approaches are proposed and benchmarked as alternatives to conventional methods with similar or better performance, condition-wise. A proof-of-concept prototype is constructed according to the proposed pipeline to demonstrate its feasibility for later experiments. A preliminary loading test was conducted, validating its satisfactory mechanical behavior. In summary, a comprehensive design pipeline for spherical domes is proposed and validated through a prototype project, during which various innovations are made, from spherical tessellation to parametrical design, analysis, and digital twin manufacturing.

KEYWORDS:

• Spherical tessellation
• bio-based dome structure
• parametric modeling
• digital twin
• robotic manufacturing
• glubam structure

Acknowledgments

We appreciate the support of UIUC-ZJU Joint Research Center for Infrastructure Resilience in Cities as Livable Environments (UIUC-ZJUI-CIRCLE). We thank Langwen Huang (ETH Zurich) for advice on GPU parallelization.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the ZJU-Ninghai Joint Research Center for Bio-based Materials and Carbon Neutral Development under Grant KH20211312; the Architectural Design & Research Institute of Zhejiang University Co., Ltd., and Center for Balance Architecture, Zhejiang University under Grant JS20200001Z, KH20203315C.