Improved Multi-body Rope Approach for Free-Form Grid Shells

Due to their ability to provide broad, lightweight roofs with slim main structural elements, grid-shell roofing systems are becoming more and more common in contemporary engineering and design. However, their widespread and extensive use outside of high-end projects or super architecture has been constrained by their complex and expensive fabrication. In order to solve this, it has been demonstrated that the Multi-body Rope Approach (MRA) is successful in calculating structurally efficient geometries that can decrease internal stresses, which are closely related to the structural shape of gridshells. Different MRA-improving strategies are put forth in this paper: The number of various structural components needed to build a gridshell can be significantly reduced thanks to Multiple Order MRA (MO-MRA) and Repulsive Nodes MRA (RN-MRA) strategy. Due to mass production, the suggested methodology offers lower manufacturing costs as well as improved building stage management. Finally, by a Matlab code and the new approaches were tested in various case-study structures.