Week1-CAD

Week 1 - Computer -aided design

The first week was devoted to sketching out and designing a potential final project idea. I wanted to explore inflatable tension structures on the Moon. Below is a sketch of my initial ideas...

The lack of atmosphere on the Moon means that every human habitat will create a big pressure differential between its interior and the exterior. Its structure and skin will have to work predominantely in tension. Working off of that principle I plan to create a vacuum box that holds a scale lunar habitat model. The model will have multiple tension members with variable force controls. I hope that this will enable me to explore adaptive form finding.

To do some initial inflatable simulations I used the Kangaroo 2 plugin for Grasshopper. I wanted to start simple and have one object inflate while another contracts and forces it back in on itself. Unfortunately I couldn't get the script to work the way I intended. The two objects simply didn't want to play together. They were happy as two completely separate entitites.

I had a feeling that placing two kangaroo solvers to represent the two individual objects might have been the error in simulation 1. In this instance I tried to consolidate the objects into one and simply retrieve points from the mesh as anchors that would pull its surface in different directions.

Even though I felt I had better control over the object in simulation 2 I didn't manage to get the tension memebers to express much of the pulling force. In the third simulation I attempted giving the anchors that were created from points on the object's mesh a vector force that I could control with simple line drawn in Rhino. This gave the best output of the 3 simulations and allowed me to control the direction in which the bubble leaned.

Thinking about bouncy castles in space

First some references that inspire my current thinking...

From top left: Frei Otto, TransHab Module, Moon Village by SOM, Soft Robotics

The Moon offers a new construction typology based around its low gravity and virtually non-existent atmosphere. Structures on the Moon would have to assume the form of a tension structure whether or no they're built on the surface, are semi-submerged or are constructed fully underground. The fleshy machines that humans are need our close-to-terrestrial pressure to be healthy and continue functioning well. As I get nearer to fabricating a funcitoning membrane and automating its inflation and tensioning, here are some initial models of its set up: