Jun 21, 2016 | By Tess
Going to a university’s open house can be a crucial part of deciding where you want to continue your higher education; from the campus, to the facilities, and even to the cafeteria, every aspect of the school’s presentation can sway you. One school, the Singapore University of Technology and Design, has gone above and beyond for their open house presentation, as a team of professors and students created a massive 3D printed architectural mesh structure to greet (and undoubtedly impress) the prospective students.
The structure, a 14.5 meter large fibrous architectural mesh was placed in SUTD’s atrium and functioned as a sort of pavilion, where current students were able to display their work in a dynamic and interesting environment. Called vMesh, the structure is made up of 91 3D printed nodes (19 were printed out of metal, while the other 72 were made from nylon), which connect 369 10mm diameter aluminum bars in a geometric fashion.
The project, meant to be an exploration of the mechanical properties of 3D printed parts, was led by two SUTD professors, Felix Raspall and Carlo Bañón and their team of researchers and students. The pavilion’s final structure, as we can see, was constructed as a tetrahedral geometry to maximize the structure’s stability and robustness.
The student works displayed within the pavilion were themselves set up on large 5 meter long platforms of varying heights, which allowed visitors to go through and physically interact with the large and lightweight 3D printed structure. Placing the structure inside the atrium made for a new dynamic within the school space that unarguably made it more interesting and appealing.
As the team behind vMesh explains, “The early use of 3D printing in architectural research, education and practice has been almost exclusively destined to produce physical representations– scaled models—of designed building. but with the recent advances in additive manufacturing have exponentially increased the mechanical properties of 3D printed parts, opening new opportunities for this technology to be directly applied to functional architectural components at an increasingly larger scale.”
The 3D printed nodes, which held the structure together, were designed using Grasshopper and c#. Additionally, each node was unique and was 3D modeled with a specific thickness and its own dimensions.
Whether you saw the 3D printed fibrous structure in person or not, it is easy to see its dynamicity, and along with that, the almost infinite possibilities of building with 3D printed components.
Posted in 3D Printing Application
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