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#1 Zimmerzerreißung
(2023)
Satzfragmente aus der Lehrveranstaltung Text & Storytelling: Was
erzählen sie über den Rest der Geschichte? Wie wirken sie,
herausgelöst aus ihrem Kontext? Ausgewählt nach ihrem
dramaturgischen Potenzial, reinszeniert, kombiniert entfalten viele
unserer Sätze ungeahnte Wirkung. Nutzen wir sie neu.
Text Telling Stories entstehen aus Zitaten von Studierenden. Verteilt
auf zwei Menschen, werden sie vielleicht zum Dialog. Kommentiert oder
kombiniert erzählen sie neue Geschichten. Was geschah davor, was danach?
Einzeln oder zusammen können die Texte genutzt werden als Lesestoff,
Gesprächsanlass, Botschaften oder Blickfang, Hilferuf, Hinweisschilder,
Statements – als Ausgangspunkt für eigene Geschichten.
Oder ganz einfach: als Postkarten.
This thesis focuses on small scale residential cooling application with unitary air conditioning units as they are wide spread in the so called Middle East North African Region. The presence of these single room or single apartment cooling systems is evaluated and their impact throughout the region assessed. They have a tremendous impact on the electric supply in countries like Saudi Arabia where most of the households already have an AC-unit. The impact in other countries with relatively less installed systems, like in Egypt, is already crucial and leads to regular power cuts. However, the stability of the grids of these countries will decrease further with a higher penetration rate of electric air conditioning systems. Current technology development aims to reduce the buildings cooling energy demand, increase the coefficient of performance, or to substitute the cooling mechanism with a different approach such as sorptive cooling systems. However, these systems require a costly and time intensive change of the building structure or an exchange of the existing cooling system. Due to this reasons, this thesis focuses on the additional installation of a small scale PV electric system, including a battery and applying advanced control strategies to utilize the thermal storage capacity of the building masses. Therefore, the present room cooling system is modeled as a reference system as it could be present throughout the entire region. This system consists of a room model of a typical apartment structure and is cross validated. Two use cases are applied: a bed room and a living room. Further, it includes a model of the solar electric system which is as well parametrized to regional values. Newly, a split unit model and an extended Kinetic Battery model are set up. The single models are combined to an entire system simulation. Afterwards, the main parameters are varied in particle swarm optimization runs to determine the impact of various boundary conditions, such as the electricity price and feed in tariffs, battery and thermal storage capacities, and solar collector field size. The simulation results are compared in terms of levelized costs of cooling, solar coverage rate and the solar cooling autonomy. The findings are compared in a case study. This study highlights the results of the Hurghada, Egypt city district of El Gouna. There, personal observations of the results where possible and an in depth analysis of the results was undertaken. In this location, the levelized costs of electricity for a small scale PV system with 1kWpeak drop there to 0.18USD/kWh with a short investment period of 5 years. They even drop to 0.08 and 0.05USD/kWh when taking an investment period of 15 or 25 years into consideration. With this values, various levelized costs of cooling are simulated as a parameter field of the particle swarm optimization. The findings show, that in most cases, the cooling costs become negative, even with relatively short investment periods. Within a bed room, a solar coverage rate of 0.9 can be achieved with a small scale PV system with weighted costs of only 677USD. In terms of solar cooling autonomy, the most cost efficient system has weighted costs of1,036USD, resulting in a coverage rate of 0.71. The living room air conditioning system can achieve best weighted costs of1,459USDfor a cooling autonomy of 0.86.Further, the practical application of a small scale PV electric solar cooling system was evaluated by the author in the case study location itself. The limitations of the theoretic system design are presented and discussed. Part of this analysis is the thermal stratification in typical vaulted apartment structures as they have a huge impact on the deviation between simulated and measured room air cooling demand.
Der Fokus in dieser Arbeit liegt auf der Konstruktion zweier Methoden:
1. der Konstruktion von DYNIBLT, einer erweiterten IBLT-Methode, deren Fokus auf der Berücksichtigung von dynamischen Nutzern liegt, d.h. Nutzern, die in einem Gebäude ihre Position verändern,
2. der Konstruktion von AMADAN, einem agentenbasierten Modellierungsansatz zur Darstellung von Nutzerverhalten in der Gebäudesimulation, welcher entsprechend auf der DYNIBLT–Methode aufbaut.
Kern der AMADAN-Methode ist die Interpretation von Gebäude und Nutzer als strikt voneinander getrennte Komponenten, welche mittels Schnittstellen sich gegenseitig beeinflussen können. Der Nutzer selbst wird ebenfalls komponentenweise betrachtet: Physiologie des Nutzers, die Fähigkeit zum Fällen von Entscheidungen sowie das Abspeichern von Ereignissen werden voneinander getrennt modelliert. Die Schnittstellen der einzelnen Komponenten sind so angelegt, dass sie einer (rudimentären) Abbildung realer Abläufe entsprechen.
Agentenbasierte Modelle haben einen erheblichen Nachteil: Damit sie über eine sinnvolle Aussagekraft verfügen, muss das Modell der direkten Umgebung des Agenten über eine hohe örtliche Auflösung verfügen (human centric view). Dies führt zu langen Simulationszeiten und in der Regel sehr komplexen Modellen. Um dem zu begegnen, wird in dieser Arbeit zusätzlich die Verwendung strukturvariabler Modellierung in der Gebäudesimulation betrachtet und bewertet.
Die Methode wird unter Verwendung schon existierender Werkzeuge und einer nicht-trivialen Umgebung evaluiert. Hierbei wird zur Abbildung des physiologischen Körpers des Nutzers ein Zwei-Knoten-Modell verwendet. Die Umgebung wird durch drei miteinander verbundene Räume abgebildet, welche in Form von 3D-Modellen verwendet werden. Der Nutzer wird hier verschiedenen Umgebungsbedingungen ausgesetzt. Die Zielsetzung des Nutzers wird in Abhängigkeit des thermischen Wohlbefindens formuliert.
Es wird insbesondere gezeigt, dass AMADAN als übergeordnetes Framework verwendet werden kann, um unterschiedliche Komponenten zur Darstellung von Nutzerverhalten in der thermischen Gebäudesimulation miteinander interagieren zu lassen. Es wird weiterhin gezeigt, dass mit DYNIBLT ein Lernprozess abgebildet wird. Hierfür werden mehrere Simulationen unter gleichen Raumbedingungen mit gleicher Zielsetzung für einen Nutzer gestartet und das Verhalten der Nutzer betrachtet. Sowohl die Beobachtung, dass in der überwiegenden Mehrheit der Simulationen der Nutzer den gesetzten Zielzustand erreicht, als auch dass hierfür unterschiedliche Wege gewählt werden, wird als Indikator für ein auf Lernen basiertes Verhalten gewertet.
Spätestens seit der Ausrufung der neuen TV-Avantgarde der Nullerjahre ist die Fernsehserie auch im deutschsprachigen akademischen Diskurs angekommen. Vielfältige Untersuchungen widmen sich dem spezifisch Seriellen der TV-Serie, neuen Narrationsformen, stilistischen Besonderheiten, neuen Produktions- und Vertriebswegen und veränderten Rezeptionsformen. Die vorliegende Analyse kann auf diese Arbeiten zurückgreifen und schlägt zugleich einen anderen Weg ein: eine Annäherung an die Serie über den »Rand«. Unter »Rand« wird ein umfassendes Untersuchungskonzept verstanden, das Theoretisierungen zu Rahmen und »framing«, zu Schwelle und Übergang sowie zu Grenze und Peripherie integriert. Den Zugang über den Rand legt das serielle Konstrukt selbst nahe: Ob mathematische, literarische, künstlerische oder TV-Serie, ihre Zusammensetzung aus mehreren Teilen und ihre potenziell unendliche Ausdehnung führen dazu, dass das Ganze der Serie immer prekär und wandelbar ist, beschworen und zusammengehalten werden muss. Diese Eigenschaften lenken den Blick auf die rahmende Ordnung, die Gestaltung der Schwellen und Zugänge zur Serie, die Bestimmung der Grenzen der potenziell unendlichen Serie sowie der Lücken zwischen den einzelnen Teilen. Die Arbeit geht von der These aus, dass diese Beschaffenheit der Serie dazu führt, dass sie über ihre Ränder definiert ist: Der Rand wird zum Kern der Serie. Dieser vermeintlichen Paradoxie geht die Arbeit nach. Sie zeigt, wie verschiedene serielle Ränder beschaffen sind, was ihre Leistung für die Serie ist und wie der serielle Rand als ›Erkenntnisgenerierer‹ funktioniert.
Nowadays, society is becoming increasingly conscious of the adverse effect of energy use on the environment, contributing to the depletion of fossil fuels and increasing global warming. Because of the substantial contribution of building energy to these concerns, the intention should be not only to improve building energy efficiency but also to promote the use of renewable technologies, especially solar energy. Today building-integrated photovoltaic (BIPV) and building-integrated solar thermal (BIST) technologies are recognized by building designers as innovative technology for clean energy and greenhouse gas reduction, especially in cities, where multi-story buildings are dominant with limited roof area.
For the Mediterranean area, the high level of solar radiation and plentiful sunny hours make it appropriate for solar system installation, however, the development of solar energy is still limited. Moreover, due to the high population growth rate, lack of local resources, high energy price, and urbanization, one of the priorities in the Mediterranean area is to promote the energy efficiency of the building both on the supply side and demand side.
Therefore, this research aims to investigate the potential of installation of the photovoltaic (PV) and solar thermal (ST) technologies in the new multi-family residential building envelope in the Mediterranean area, taking Amman, Jordan, as a case study. The focus of this research is on the typical multi-family residential buildings in Amman, as it is the city where about 50% of the new construction in Jordan is taking place, and the residential buildings are the major consumers of energy and electricity in Jordan. The multi-family buildings also form about 75% of the total housing stock in Jordan. The typical multi-family building studied here is composed of five main floors, contains ten residential apartments; the area of each apartment is 150 m2. It is assumed that the building is located in a common residential urbanized zone in Jordan, with 6 m sides offset and 8 m back offset, assuming that one side is facing the main street, and all the buildings have a maximum allowable height of 15 m. All the architectural parameters related to the multi-family buildings have been defined through analyzing the residential building stock in Jordan.
In order to achieve the research aim, the possibility of reducing the energy demand of the typical multi-family building in Amman, Jordan, through passive and architectural design strategies was firstly investigated. After that, different performance criteria were evaluated, mainly quantitative criteria including energy consumption, energy production, and life cycle assessment (energy, carbon, cost). In addition to the qualitative criteria, including visibility and functionality, the purpose here is to emphasize the substantial function of BIPV systems. Each performance criterion was assessed alone. Then, all the performance criteria results were presented in a decision support matrix, which can be used as a comparison to evaluate and identify the solar system's application of choice, based on the criteria of the user. Moreover, a new energy index was formulated to evaluate the overall annual energy performance of BIPV design in terms of multifunctional effects on building energy.
Different methods were adopted in this research; the qualitative criteria were evaluated based on the literature review analysis, while the quantitative criteria were evaluated by using different simulation software, previous literature review, and spreadsheet calculations.
Literature review analyses were conducted in order to identify the relevant possibilities and the aesthetical solution the market offers, and the multiple benefits for PV and ST integration. The knowledge acquired from this part played a significant role in choosing and designing the proposals of PV and ST installation into the multi-story building envelope. Regarding the simulation studies, different building and energy simulation software was used to simulate and optimize the energy performance of the typical multi-family building in Amman, Jordan, through passive and architectural design strategies, as well as to find out the optimum design of the energy system in terms of energy performance (energy demand of the system, and solar energy fraction), and to investigate the energy-saving potential of PV and ST systems with various designs (tilt angles, azimuth, installed area, etc.). For the building energy simulation, each zone in the building was modeled as a space of its own. The energy demand was calculated on an hourly basis for a period of a whole year. The results from the simulation analysis, related literature and guidelines were adopted to conduct a life cycle assessment through spreadsheet calculation, to determine the long-term performance in terms of energy and carbon emissions, as well as cost considerations, taking into account the current market practice. The cradle-to-grave approach was adapted for the environmental life cycle assessments.
The general conclusion of this research is that installing the PV modules into the multi-family buildings envelope in Amman, Jordan, makes a positive contribution in terms of energy performance, as PV systems can cover up to 97% of the new building electricity demand when they are installed on both the roof and south façade, and up to 43% is covered by installing the PV modules into the south facade. Regarding the environmental life cycle assessment, the results proved the carbon saving potential of all the proposed PV systems, as the energy payback time (EPBT) is between 1.5- 3.5 years and the carbon payback time (CPBT) is between 3.4- 7.8 years. However, for the life cycle cost assessment the result showed that due to high capital cost and low cost of electricity, neither system is currently feasible for investment, as the payback time (PBT) is between 9.0- 16 years. However, with future advances in each system and more efficient designs, the payback periods would become tangible and therefore yield better performances. Lastly, the results were used to derive a decision support matrix aimed at providing a friendly approach to facilitate the implementation of solar building applications.
Die Dissertation widmet sich Schreibweise, Schrift und Schreiben (écriture) essayistischer Texte der Schriftstellerin und Philosophin Hélène Cixous unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Rolle, die der Körper (corps) für diese Schreibweise spielt. Die Arbeit adressiert die Relation zwischen Körper und Schrift als ‹écriture du corps›. Im Fokus stehen Techniken und Formen des Lesens und Schreibens in entsprechenden Essays von Cixous sowie die epistemische Kritik, die diese Texte gegenüber Schreibweisen und -praktiken der Theoriebildung in den Geistes- und Kulturwissenschaften auf praktische Weise formulieren. Die Positionierung von Cixous' Schreibweise wird vor diesem Hintergrund als ‹Avant-Theorie› gefasst. Diese charakterisiert ein fluider, poetischer Umgang mit Begriffen, das Unterlaufen (der zumeist ungeschriebenen) Regeln von Wissensdiskursen sowie die Einbeziehung nicht diskursiver Formen von Körperwissen. Besondere Aufmerksamkeit gilt dem vielstimmigen und korrespondierenden Charakter dieses Theoretisierens, seinem lesenden Schreiben, schreibenden Lesen bzw. Antworten auf andere Stimmen und Texte. Avant-Theorie lenkt somit die Aufmerksamkeit auf die Momentevor der Etablierung einer Theorie. Deutlich wird dabei, dass das vermeintliche Zuvor (avant), sich nie zu einem abgeschlossenen Danach verfestigt, insofern Theorie konsequent als ein zirkulierendes Lesen und Schreiben mit anderen bzw. Antworten auf andere verstanden wird.
Die Dissertation mit dem Titel »Civic Tools – Werkzeuge zur sozialen und politischen Partizipation von Nachbarschaften« untersucht neue Möglichkeiten von Teilhabe aus der Designforschungsperspektive.
Durch die Zunahme von Misstrauen in Institutionen und das daraus resultierende Schwinden repräsentativer Integrationskräfte, wie von Parteien, Verbänden und Kirchen (vgl. Walter, 2013, S.10), entsteht ein Vakuum, welches zunehmend durch die Zivilgesellschaft gefüllt werden muss. Es entwickelt sich ein Freiraum, in dem temporär, themenbezogen und flexibel agiert werden kann und in dem Veränderungen so schnell wie möglich erkennbar werden sollen. Dabei wird die Zivilgesellschaft durch die neuen Möglichkeiten des Digitalen unterstützt.
Genau an diesem Punkt setzen informelle Zugänge der Partizipation an, welche in dieser Dissertation in Form von Werkzeugen (Sennett, 2008) experimentell erprobt und analysiert werden. Dafür wurden zwei Fallstudien in Berliner Nachbarschaften durchgeführt und evaluiert – zum einen auf der Fischerinsel, zum anderen am Mehringplatz.
Auf partizipative Art und Weise wurden Möglichkeiten des kollektiven Agierens und des Ko-Gestaltens aufgezeigt. Die teilnehmenden Akteure wurden als Expertinnen und Experten des Alltags aktiv in den Designprozess eingebunden. Es wurde sich unterschiedlichen Medien und Ausdrucksformen bedient, um Formen der Teilhabe für diese Akteure zu entwickeln und zugänglich zu machen. Durch die gemeinsamen Aktivitäten wurde unterstrichen, wie wenig Aufwand es braucht, um die eigene Position sichtbar zu machen und dieser Gehör zu verschaffen. Es wurde aber auch spürbar, welche enorme Anstrengung es benötigt, solche zivilgesellschaftlichen Strukturen langfristig zu etablieren.
Durch offenliegende Mechanismen, Open-Source-Veröffentlichungen über Plattformen wie Github, sowie gedruckten Anleitungen, sollte das Black-Box-Prinzip der Werkzeuge aufgelöst werden, damit die lokalen Akteure in die Lage versetzt werden, sich die Werkzeuge selbst anzueignen und für andere Kontexte, Themen und Situationen zu adaptieren. Durch diese Art der demokratischen Technologieentwicklung sollten die Werkzeuge zu »commons« – also zu Gemeingütern nach der Theorie Ostroms (1990) – werden.
Festzuhalten bleibt, dass die direkte Übertragung der Werkzeuge auf die lokalen Akteure
noch nicht autark stattgefunden hat. Jedoch fanden die entwickelten Werkzeuge über die Nachbarschaften hinaus viel Anklang: auf nationalen und internationalen Konferenzen, in Museen oder Workshops wurden die Werkzeuge auf unterschiedliche Art und Weise eingesetzt und vielfältig weiterentwickelt (vgl. Huybrechts, 2014).
Abschließend kann resümiert werden, dass der flexible Forschungsrahmen
für das Gelingen solcher Civic-Design-Vorhaben – in denen ständig unvorhergesehene Situationen entstehen und mit fragilen Strukturen umgegangen werden muss – essentiell ist. Nach dem Prinzip des Infrastrukturierens (Star, 1996; Ehn, 2008) ist es möglich, dass das Civic Design in Zukunft nicht nur eine Brücke zwischen dem physischen und digitalen Raum schlägt – sondern auch zu schwinden drohende Verbindungen zwischen Bürgerschaft, Institutionen oder Politik, herstellen kann. Die entwickelten Werkzeuge zeigen neue Formen der Partizipation auf, welche von unterschiedlichen Akteuren angenommen wurden. In Zukunft gilt es die langfristige Verstetigung und detaillierte Ausarbeitung der Werkzeuge durch weitere Forschungsvorhaben zu vertiefen und auszuarbeiten.
The project DAAN (Design of Assistive Ambient Notification Systems, funded by the German Ministry for Education and Research) explored ambient notification as a part of an assistive computing system for elderly users. Within the framework of this project we investigated the potential of textiles as ambient notification devices, with a focus on knitted fabric. This is the documentation of the project activities at University of Arts Berlin.
Decolonizing the Earview of Design: Listening Anxieties and the Apparatus of Auditory Governance
(2018)
This dissertation attends to the intersection of sound, material culture, racism, and police violence in Brazil from a decolonizing perspective. With a focus on theories informed by cultural and sound studies, it unravels the contingent arrangements through which certain designed objects and practices function as material-discursive nodes for the normalization and perpetuation of racialized violences. To explore these ideas, it reads design—a field of knowledge and a set of practices—as a material-discursive apparatus, accountable for not only the results but also the conditions of possibility for any research endeavor.
The main driving force of this work is the identification and evincing of ‘listening anxieties.’ These emerge through enactments of political consensus, policing, and compliance; the articulation of these three in institutional, designerly, as well as everyday practices is what this research identifies as the Apparatus of Auditory Governance (or AAG). More specifically, I look at three manifestations of these auditory governances in contemporary Brazil—from the early 2000s to the judiciary Coup d’Etat of late 2016. These range from the criminalization of jukeboxes by a Military Police acting outside the scope of written law in so-called ‘pacified’ neighborhoods in Rio de Janeiro, to the construction of a seven kilometer-long acoustic barrier in the city as a device for urban segregation, to the deployment of sound bombs as devices for the enforcement of silence by the same police force in São Paulo.
The articulation of auditory governances, however, is not fixed; rather, it shifts and mutates to account for distinct and diverse experiences of listening. These shifts are what this work calls earviews: a conceptual orientation which determines the “listening point” where narratives and perceptions of auditory reality unfold from. The AAG, articulated and deconstructed at the intersection of distinct and conflicting earviews, forms the main method of this dissertation, and is of particular interest for sound and design studies. By understanding the earview as an asset of and for designing, it is possible to interrogate the role of design in the enforcement, reproduction, and normalization of sonic violences, and the erasure of other(ed) narratives of listening. Rather than simply evincing the hegemony of normative—qua racialized—earviews, I intervene by reading them through first-person accounts and storytelling stemming from fieldwork with artists and activists in Brazil, as well as from two movies by Brazilian directors—O Som ao Redor (2012) and Branco Sai, Preto Fica (2014). These intersections are further complemented by a semi-fictional narrative created throughout five collective pedagogical sessions fusing designing and fabulation. This format, named “Yarn Sessions,” is my methodological proposition for design research in this work.
This research started out by posing three broad questions relating to the connection between auditory practices—i.e. sounds and their social, cultural, and political engagements—and the design of listening devices. It asked: what is the contribution of design to the politics of mediated listening and its devices? What might be the possible, probable and/or preferable enactments of the political agency of designed listening devices? These initial questions are all addressed by this work, and have shifted from their initial form as a general investigation on the entanglement of design and listening, to offer an inquiry and an intervention on violences enacted with and through sound.
This work thus participates in a re-historicization of the colonial underpinnings of design, while at the same time offering a decolonizing methodological proposition for design research and design studies with a sound and listening-oriented locus. It demonstrates that the material conditions of sonic violence—from architectural planning to transitional/illegalized sound objects to the development of weaponry—are a form of ontological design (cf. Anne-Marie Willis) which succeeds by making its own colonial and racialized ethos discursively and materially invisible. This ontological enunciation demands the accountability of the designer as both producer and reproducer of racialized/colonial phenomena in the making of their own practices.
Yet this research does not align itself completely with discourses from the “ontological turn” or “new materialisms” in philosophy (cf. Karen Barad), insofar as these often undermine and erase the role played by coloniality and “racialized assemblages” (cf. Alexander Weheliye) to the constitution of its own ontologies and epistemologies. My proposition for design understands the field to constitute in itself an ontoepistemology (cf. Willis, Gloria Anzaldúa), albeit reading such ontological alignments through decolonial and critical race studies. In so doing, it opens up a new field of inquiry in which sound studies and decolonial thought inform designerly inquiries into material culture not only for the evincing of specific material-discursive phenomena (e.g. sonic violences), but also for intervening on them with intersectional and decolonizing frameworks.
This thesis investigates and describes the design and structural behaviour of elastic gridshells. Elastic gridshells are shell structures composed of a single- or multi-layer grid of continuous profiles, which are initially straight and will be progressively bent until achieving an architecturally and structurally satisfactory geometry. Usually used as medium to large span surface structures, elastic gridshells present a wide variety in their surface geometry, grid configuration and materiality. One important structural criterion of elastic gridshells is the high residual stress to which they are subjected after the bending process. Using materials with high limit strain, the residual utilisation rate can be reduced. In the first part of the work, the structural aspects to be considered on the design procedure of elastic gridshells are described and identified on existing design approaches. Then, the mechanical properties of available materials, suitable for elastic gridshells, have been compared and application examples have been presented and illustrated.
Elastic gridshells offer significant cost and time advantages during the production, transport and construction processes. Nevertheless, the shaping of the initially flat grid also generates important bending stresses on the structures, reducing therewith their bearing capacity against external loads. In order to diminish the initial stresses, profiles with low sections and materials with low modulus of elasticity are usually chosen. However, this leads to a reduction of the global stiffness of the gridshell which can result in stability problems. With an optimisation of the grid pattern - orientation and arrangement of the grid profiles - a minimisation of the profiles’ curvature can be obtained and the load-bearing capacity of the gridshells improved. In the second part of the thesis, an optimisation method based on variational principles for regular and irregular gridshells is proposed and different case studies presented. The aim of using variational principles is to establish extremal functions which minimize the value of quantities related to particular grid properties. These properties are: the curvature of the profiles, the distance to a target surface geometry and the deviation of the edge lengths from a desired mesh size. The advantage of this method is that weighting factors can be applied to the grid parameters to be minimised, so that a variety of grid configurations can be established responding to different specific requirements.
The bending process and load-bearing behaviour of elastic gridshells can be analysed using three-dimensional finite element models. During the shaping of the profiles, internal forces are induced on the structure, so that the final equilibrium shape of the gridshell will be attained once its edges have been fixed, the bracing elements have been assembled and the external shaping forces have been removed. The goal of the numerical analysis is to quantitatively evaluate the geometry and material stresses resulting from the shaping process and the load-bearing capacity of the gridshell under external loading. In the third part of the thesis, the influence of the orientation and arrangement of the grid profiles on the residual stresses after erection process and on the distribution of forces and deformability of the gridshell under external loading are analysed on three regular anticlastic gridshells with varying grid pattern. Moreover, the potential and limitations of using tensile membranes as restraining and at the same time covering element of elastic gridshells are studied on a hemispheric regular elastic gridshell.
Numerical techniques are commonly used for the calculation of stress distributions and displacements of complex indeterminate bearing structures. Nevertheless, to model the elements they are composed of and the connection properties between them, simplifications and approximations are done. The purpose of the fourth and last part of the work is to analyse the influence of these simplifications on the results of the simulation and thereby recalibrate and benchmark the numerical models with physical prototypes. Two gridshells composed of GFRP profiles have been built: an irregular hemisphere of 10 m diameter, braced with a third layer of profiles, and a regular hemisphere of 5 m diameter, restraint with a tensile membrane. The prototypes have been loaded symmetrically and asymmetrically applying point loads at the grid nodes and the resulting nodal displacements have been compared to those calculated with the numerical models.