Bending-Active Lamination For Spatial Timber Structures - Robotically Fabricated Components with Continuous Fibre Alignment

This project explores the use of bending as a forming and clamping process for fabricating laminated timber components. By over-bending stacked wooden lamellas, their unequal shortening and lengthening create pressure between the strips. This allows a bending-active lamination to take place, thereby eliminating the need for external forming methods. Here, the elastic bending of the material becomes a form-finding process of the equilibrium state curve referred to as the elastica curve. The range of resulting geometries for this system is bound by this elastica-based design space. With the precision and flexibility that robotic fabrication offers, a range of unique elements is created and made into a larger assembly, where a set of architectural and structural investigations helps create a 3-dimensional redundant component-based system.

ITECH M.Sc. Thesis Project 2017: Bending-Active Lamination For Spatial Timber Structures - Robotically Fabricated Components with Continuous Fibre Alignment
Bahar Al Bahar

Thesis Advisers: Oliver Krieg, Abel Groenewolt

Thesis Supervisor: Prof. Achim Menges
Second Supervisor: Prof. Jan Knippers