Modular textile reinforced concrete (TRC) shell structures: An exploration through geometrical and structural design

Curved thin-walled shell structures are very promising towards the future, as they possess the ability to carry their loads efficiently, resulting in very thin designs and therefore a reduced material consumption. Recent developments of new construction materials and innovative fabrication techniques have led to a resurgence in this research domain. Using Textile Reinforced Concrete (TRC) in the shell designs significantly reduces the required cross-sectional thickness, due to the use of fibres. On top of that, these fibres are very flexible, making it possible to easily create nicely curved surfaces. Still, a major issue is the cost of the formworks, as they are in many cases project-specific and therefore not reusable. Fortunately, recent research towards a modular design approach may solve this problem. Several modular parts are already designed, which can be assembled in many ways to create a wide variety of shell configurations. As a result, only a few numbers of formworks need to be made that can serve for a vast amount of shell structures. The main objective of this research is to investigate the structural behaviour of these configurations and to evaluate their load bearing efficiency. A second objective is to evaluate the influence of considering different types of connections between the modules on the overall structural behaviour of the shells. The load bearing efficiency of the shells will be evaluated by considering both fully fixed and fully hinged connections between the modules. The results are very promising, as it is observed that some of the considered shell configurations possess a better load bearing behaviour than the form-found structure from which the modules are extracted.