Structural composite members in architecture fabricated by CAD/CAE/CAM technology.

摘要

The doctoral research in this dissertation is aimed at exploring new materials and innovative methods for fabricating complex-shaped buildings, which have surfaced as a prevailing trend in architecture today.; Over the past few years, the field of architecture has witnessed revolutionary changes in design. The recent completion of Frank O. Gehry's new Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, brought unprecedented attention to complex-shaped, non-conventional designs and its influence on the global architectural trend has been immense.; In following these latest trends, the author was drawn to the issues concerning construction materials and methods that are being currently adopted in realizing these complicated designs. It is perhaps inevitable that the traditional steel construction methods, suitable for use in the conventional linear shapes, face tremendous challenges and limitations in building such complex-shaped designs. In the author's opinion, the next step to go from here is to seek joint efforts between the architectural field and the engineering field to search for a new methodology which will best serve the contemporary design style.; This research first focused on examining the problems that traditional methods pose for the new complex-shaped buildings. Paying attention to Gehry's recent projects, the author was able to identify major difficulties in association with representing and constructing these complicated shapes, mainly in terms of the relationship between the primary structure and the envelope surface.; The second part of the research moved on to proposing a new alternative to the traditional methods, by utilizing polymer composite materials (PCM) as construction material and employing advanced Computer-Aided Design (CAD)/Computer Aided Engineering (CAE)/Computer-Aided Manufacturing (CAM) technologies. More specifically, the author has attempted to present effective theories in support of the two following ideas: (1) circular tubes made of PCM are the most promising alternative to regular steel members, especially steel tubes, to follow the envelope surface of the complex shaped building. (2) state-of-the-art CAD/CAE/CAM technologies are the most essential tools to achieve the geometrical and functional quality of the proposed new material.; In the second phase, the primary focus of the quantitative approach was on fabricating an experimental model (1:1 scale prototype) called “ a unit of boundary structures”, the basic unit of structure system that wraps a complex-shaped building's entire territory . (Abstract shortened by UMI.)