Textile steel - experimental investigations of textile fabrication processes for steel shell and lattice structures

Global steel production amounts to around 2 billion tons per year [1]. Half of the world's annual production of steel is used in the construction of buildings and infrastructure [2]. Steel is a material that can be recycled without loss of properties, a huge potential for urban mining and the circular economy, yet, the demand for new steel is higher than the offer of secondary raw material. Lightweight structures are saving material and can therefore help to reduce the extraction of materials through the primary route and optimise the use of secondary raw material, which can be extracted through urban mining [3].At the intersection of research and teaching, the paper examines the formation of concepts, starting from an understanding of materials and fabrication technologies and going forward to questioning and rethinking existing methods with strong focuses on computational design and digital fabrication processes that enable novel concepts for circular economy in construction. By applying fabrication concepts from textile technology, a series of steel structures were re-conceptualized, redesigned and prototyped. The material distribution was locally tailored, based on the interplay between geometry and structural behaviour. ... mehrSeveral prototypes were built to validate the overall approach, and in a next step, recycled secondary building materials could be used.