Ann-Sofie Fisker: New technologies for creating inexpensive curved architectural formwork are today available among designers and architects. However, due to the production constraints, designers are not always able to fabricate and realize their ideas.
In this project, we have considered one of these technologies: robotic hot-blade cutting. Hot-blade cutting of architectural formwork allows architects to create surfaces and facades with a large variety of curved shapes. The hot-blade cutting process is to melt through the formwork with a heated flexible rod, the shape of which is necessarily an elastic curve. Thus, to design a surface to be built by this process, we need to design surfaces swept out by varying elastic curves. We have in this project presented various tools for designing with elastic curves and elastic splines. This is not straightforward, due to the nonlinear nature of elastic curves. However, by identifying a suitable polynomial proxy for elastic curves, we have produced a set of algorithms that allow one to easily design surfaces for hot-blade cutting.
Main supervisor: David Brander (Main supervisor), co-supervisors: Jens Gravesen, Andreas Bærentzen
Published as PhD report: Surface design and rationalization for robotic hot-blade cutting
Effective start/end date 15/12/2015 → 14/12/2018