Thin-shell structure

Shell structure of the TWA Flight Center Building by Eero Saarinen, John F. Kennedy International Airport, New York

The Forest Opera, an open-air amphitheatre in Sopot, Poland, with a membrane roof.

Great Court, with a lattice thin-shell roof by Buro Happold with Norman Foster, British Museum, London

Thin-shell structures are also called plate and shell structures. They are lightweight constructions using shell elements. These elements, typically curved, are assembled to make large structures. Typical applications include aircraft fuselages, boat hulls, and the roofs of large buildings.

Definition

A thin shell is defined as a shell with a thickness which is small compared to its other dimensions and in which deformations are not large compared to thickness. A primary difference between a shell structure and a plate structure is that, in the unstressed state, the shell structure has curvature as opposed to the plates structure which is flat. Membrane action in a shell is primarily caused by in-plane forces (plane stress), but there may be secondary forces resulting from flexural deformations. Where a flat plate acts similar to a beam with bending and shear stresses, shells are analogous to a cable which resists loads through tensile stresses. The ideal thin shell must be capable of developing both tension and compression.^[1]

Types

The most popular types of thin-shell structures are:

Concrete shell structures, often cast as a monolithic dome or stressed ribbon bridge or saddle roof
Lattice shell structures, also called gridshell structures, often in the form of a geodesic dome or a hyperboloid structure
Membrane structures, which include fabric structures and other tensile structures, cable domes, and pneumatic structures.

Notes

↑ Chen, Wai-Fah, Handbook of Structural Engineering, 1997 CRC Press

References

Bechthold, M.: Innovative Surface Structures. (2008) Taylor and Francis.
"Vladimir G. Suchov 1853-1939. Die Kunst der sparsamen Konstruktion.", Rainer Graefe und andere, 192 S., Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart, 1990, ISBN 3-421-02984-9.

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