Timber Shell Structures

Shell structures are structurally efficient but difficult to manufacture and thus expansive. Actively bent grid shells and segmental plate shells could be alternatives. The first kind utilizes bended members to form a continuously curved geometry and thus reduce the complexity of the joints. The second kind utilizes the stability inherited in trivalent geometries to be able to build a shell without using bending stiff joints. Both these two types of timber shell structures could largely reduce the construction cost. That is why they are chosen as the research topics. The dynamic relaxation method (DR) is applied in this research as an important numerical method. It is used as the fundamental base for developing the form-finding tools of both actively bent grid Shells and the segmental grid shells. A solver capable of the structural analysis of beam system is also developed here based on DR. Through the text, we show that DR could handle not only form-finding problems but also geometrically nonlinear analysis. The dissertation consists of four parts. Part I is the introduction. Part II and Part III present both the form-finding and analysis techniques of these two types of timber shell structures. The last part is the conclusions.