Laura Balangé

The advancement of digital fabrication technologies and computational design has expanded the possibilities in architecture and construction. These technologies enable the creation of innovative structures and the exploration of non-standard materials, resulting in a new understanding of the design process and the development of advanced digital tools. Among these innovations, coreless filament winding, a robotic fabrication process, has facilitated new applications of fiber-polymer composites in architecture over the past decade. Coreless wound structures are characterized by a sequential and emergent nature, where the final geometry is shaped by material behavior. As a result, these structures are inherently difficult to predict, requiring constant feedback between digital models and physical prototypes due to the limited availability of fast, accessible simulation methods. This paper presents a simulation method developed to address this gap by supporting the early design stage of coreless wound fiber structures. The method incorporates relevant design and fabrication parameters while maintaining a necessary level of abstraction to ensure efficiency and accessibility. A case study was conducted to evaluate the simulation’s accuracy and examine the influence of different parameters on the final geometry. The study benchmarks a set of digitally simulated fiber specimens against their physical counterparts. The physical behavior of the fiber elements was captured using a monitoring method that scans the structure after each fiber segment is wound, enabling the observation of material behavior throughout the process. The results demonstrate the method’s efficacy, showing an average displacement deviation of −20 mm and high precision in fiber interaction, with 73% of specimens achieving 100% accuracy in generating intersection points. Furthermore, the study assesses the influence of design and fabrication parameters on fiber behavior, enabling informed decisions in early-stage design. By introducing an accessible and computationally efficient simulation method, the research aims to contribute to the field by providing efficient, early-stage feedback and an initial understanding of material behavior in coreless filament winding, while also identifying current limitations and directions for future research.

Segmented timber shells present a novel building system that utilizes modular, planar building components to create lightweight free-form structures in architecture. Recent advancements in the research field of segmented timber shells pursue, among others, two fundamentally opposing research objectives. 1. The modularity of their building components facilitates the reuse of such structures in response to a changing built environment. 2. Advanced developments aim at establishing segmented timber shells as permanent building structures for sustainable architecture. This paper addresses the first research objective through the successful relocation of the BUGA Wood Pavilion in the context of the proposed methodology of Co-Design for circular construction. The methods and results involve integrative design and engineering processes and advanced quality assessment methods, including structural, geodetic, and physical properties for modular timber constructions. The BUGA Wood Pavilion serves as a building demonstrator for the presented research on segmented shells as lightweight, reusable, and durable timber structures.

Fiber-reinforced composites offer innovative solutions for architectural applications with high strength and low weight. Coreless filament winding extends industrial processes, reduces formwork, and allows for tailoring of fiber layups to specific requirements. A previously developed computational co-design framework for coreless filament winding is extended toward the integration of reciprocal design feedback to maximize design flexibility and inform design decisions throughout the process. A multi-scalar design representation is introduced, representing fiber structures at different levels of detail to generate feedback between computational design, engineering, and fabrication. Design methods for global, component, and material systems are outlined and feedback generation is explained. Structural and fabrication feedback are classified, and their integration is described in detail. This paper demonstrates how reciprocal feedback allows for co-evolution of domains of expertise and extends the existing co-design framework toward design problems. The developed methods are shown in two case studies at a global and component scale.

The linear design workflow for structural systems, involving a multitude of iterative loops and specialists, obstructs disruptive innovations. During design iterations, vast amounts of data in different reference systems, origins, and significance are generated. This data is often not directly comparable or is not collected at all, which implies a great unused potential for advancements in the process. In this paper, a novel workflow to process and analyse the data sets in a unified reference frame is proposed. From this, differently sophisticated iteration loops can be derived. The developed methods are presented within a case study using coreless filament winding as an exemplary fabrication process within an architectural context. This additive manufacturing process, using fiber-reinforced plastics, exhibits great potential for efficient structures when its intrinsic parameter variations can be minimized. The presented method aims to make data sets comparable by identifying the steps each data set needs to undergo (acquisition, pre-processing, mapping, post-processing, analysis, and evaluation). These processes are imperative to provide the means to find domain interrelations, which in the future can provide quantitative results that will help to inform the design process, making it more reliable, and allowing for the reduction of safety factors. The results of the case study demonstrate the data set processes, proving the necessity of these methods for the comprehensive inter-domain data comparison.

This paper describes a holistic quality model (HQM) and assessment to support decision-making processes in construction. A graded concrete slab serves as an example to illustrate how to consider technical, environmental, and social quality criteria and their interrelations. The evaluation of the design and production process of the graded concrete component shows that it has advantages compared to a conventional solid slab, especially in terms of environmental performance. At the same time, the holistic quality model identifies potential improvements for the technology of graded concrete. It will be shown that the holistic quality model can be used to (a) consider the whole life cycle in decision-making in the early phases and, thus, make the complexity of construction processes manageable for quality and sustainability assessments and (b) make visible interdependencies between different quality and sustainability criteria, to help designers make better-informed decisions regarding the overall quality. The results show how different quality aspects can be assessed and trade-offs are also possible through the understanding of the relationships among characteristics. For this purpose, in addition to the quality assessment of graded concrete, an overview of the interrelations of different quality characteristics is provided. While this article demonstrates how a HQM can support decision-making in design, the validity of the presented evaluation is limited by the data availability and methodological challenges, specifically regarding the quantification of interrelations.

The Cluster of Excellence Integrative Computational Design and Construction for Architecture at the University of Stuttgart brings together various disciplines to jointly develop amongst other things a better understanding of processes in the manufacturing and construction domain. One of the cluster’s aims is to create new solutions for the construction of lightweight fibrous structures using coreless winding of lightweight fiber composite systems. For this purpose, a precise geometry and an understanding of the fibers’ behavior during the production process are of major importance. The fibers’ production process is monitored by repeatedly scanning the fibers during different stages of the process using a terrestrial laser scanner. In order to determine the geometry of the fibers’ axes as well as their cross-sections, two different strategies are used. The first strategy focuses on the segmentation of several straight lines between two intersection points. For the comparison of the individual fabrication steps, the positions of the intersection points are contrasted. For the cross-sectional areas of the fibers, orthogonal planes of intersection are then defined and all points within a predefined area are projected onto this plane. Then the area is calculated using a convex hull. In the second strategy, the fibers‘ main axes are represented by best-fitting B-spline curves. The borders of the cross-sections of interest are also approximated by best-fitting B-spline curves, forming the basis for the final determination of the cross-sectional areas. In this case study two epochs are analyzed with a deformation of the size of around 1cm. For both epochs the cross-sections are calculated in cm steps.

In coreless filament winding, resin-impregnated fibre filaments are wound around anchor points without an additional mould. The final geometry of the produced part results from the interaction of fibres in space and is initially undetermined. Therefore, the success of large-scale coreless wound fibre composite structures for architectural applications relies on the reciprocal collaboration of simulation, fabrication, quality evaluation, and data integration domains. The correlation of data from those domains enables the optimization of the design towards ideal performance and material efficiency. This paper elaborates on a computational co-design framework to enable new modes of collaboration for coreless wound fibre–polymer composite structures. It introduces the use of a shared object model acting as a central data repository that facilitates interdisciplinary data exchange and the investigation of correlations between domains. The application of the developed computational co-design framework is demonstrated in a case study in which the data are successfully mapped, linked, and analysed across the different fields of expertise. The results showcase the framework’s potential to gain a deeper understanding of large-scale coreless wound filament structures and their fabrication and geometrical implications for design optimization.