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This research focuses on the singularities in force patterns, like thrust networks and load paths, and materialized patterns like voussoir tessellation for masonry vaults, beam grids for elastic gridshells, corrugation reinforcements for shells or strips for membranes.
Two complementary approaches have been developed:
- a feature-based approach provides an intuitive means to explore patterns respecting alignment to the boundaries of a surface, including point and curve features, which can stem from statics heuristics; and,
- a rule-based approach provides a grammar for comprehensive exploration by bringing structuredness to the topological design space. A rule-based distance between topologies allows adjacent designs to be generated and combined, and to respect topological requirements, like two-colorability through projection to constrained sub-spaces.
This research is implemented in the toolbox singular from compas_pattern, a package of COMPAS, to be released in Spring 2019.
This research is a joint effort with the Laboratoire Navier, École des Ponts ParisTech, CNRS, IFSTTAR.