DEPLOYABLE STRUCTURES

Prof. Sudarshin Krishna, UIUC/ Graduate / Fall 2021

The goal of the project was to learn about an innovative structural system that serves special purposes and needs. For example, disaster-relief shelters where ease of transportation and rapid deployment are needed, for roofs of stadia to have all-weather sports, for structures used in outer-space exploration, for responsive facades, for iconic public architecture to enliven a space, and whenever a structure needs to be reused without the burden of dismantling and reassembly. We had to construct a deployable sphere made of angulated scissor units. For that, we selected a polygon of 12 sides, 16 sides,or 24 sides. The model had one horizontal ring as shown below. The number of vertical rings was half the number of polygon sides, i.e., a 16 sided polygon should have 8 vertical rings. The connectors at the poles were designed accordingly. This was an individual modelling project and was completed in a time frame of 1 week.