We’ve recreated all five pieces of the Curved Space for 3D printing, transforming them into a toy. The goal was to explore the challenges and problems of the structure on a small scale in order to better understand what needs attention when scaling up.
Continue readingIn an effort to advance discrete element aggregation using the Grasshopper3D plugin WASP (and Andrea building new features into it along the way), we are exploring a ‘sequence-based design’ approach and identified Peter Pearce’s Curved Space Diamond Structure as an ideal foundation.
Using entire bike frames connected at the standard bike joints, 2D lattices can be formed.
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Based on the Sommerville tetrahedron, part systems using multiple compatible types can be created that produce more differentiated complex aggregations.
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Using an aggregation system based on regular Sommerville-tetra cells, bike frame clusters can be connected along edges.
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Combining the concept of bike frames contained in cells with aggregation systems based on the Sommerville-type interconnected structures can be created.
Continue readingAlongside Hill’s tetrahedra there are also other irregular tetrahedral cell types to fill space, of which the Sommerville 1 tetrahedron is a very promising one regarding our intentions.
The particularity here is, that the No. 1 tetrahedron consist of two “brackets” of each 2 triangles with two edges the length of the square root of 3 and one edge length of 2, connected at an right angle at their edges of the length 2.
Continue readingWhile it is not possible to fill space with regular tetrahedra, there are – according to WOLFRAM – five known irregular space-filling tetrahedral cells, when mirror cells are excluded.
At first we looked at Hill’s tetrahedra and Izidor Hafner “Definitions of Hill’s Tetrahedra” on the Wolfram Demonstrations Project was very helpful in setting up our Grasshopper definitions.
In an alternative concept for discrete aggregation systems that are based on packed volumes, parts could also be defined as individual faces of a solid.
This idea is studied using the faces of rhombic dodecahedrons that can be arranged as a space-filling tesselation.
After aggregating regular tetrahedra following different set of rules these tetra-units are replaced by by various bike-frame cluster modules.
Each of these cluster modules is made up of 2-3 bike frames from the scanned set and fitted into a regular tetrahedral container. For this study only copies of one single cluster type are populated throughout the aggregated frameworks replacing the regular tetra-units. This is done assuming that other bike-frames within a certain tolerance range can be used to form the same combinations (possibly with a slightly different clipping at the joint-plate areas). The bigger the inventory of bike frames, the more likely it is to find very similar bike-frames.
Fig.1: Bike Cluster TYPE 12 is used for the first study. Dependening on the bike-frames orientation within one tetrahedral cell informed by the respective connection logic (from left to right: face to face, edge to edge, vertex to vertex) the amount of “empty space” locally within one unit varies immensely.
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