The research project was done at Schafbock Design + Workshop, Ahmedabad, India. Fabric formwork system exhibits great potential to construct concrete shells. But fabric needs a support framework which helps it to attain and maintain the desired shape under concrete loads.  A lightweight bending active spline framework can be employed as a support system for the fabric formwork. Bending-active splines are curved beams whose geometry is depended on its initially straight configurations. Their forming nature and load bearing capacity greatly depends on their inner mechanical stress and geometrical stiffness.
The research proposes a novel hybrid system which consists of bending active gridshell and fabric as formwork for constructing a thin shell slab system. It tries to develop a high-performance design and equally low-tech construction system which is easy to construct with minimum guidance to construction workers. The appropriate geometry is derived after several form-finding iterations under the beam bending pre-stress, concrete hydrostatic pressure, dead and live loads. In order to check the technical feasibility of the designed system a scaled prototype for the slab system is constructed. Referring to the experiences gained from the prototype, the project also discusses future applications of the designed system and improvements needed for its further enhancement.

Publication: A. Shah, S. Irani, “Design and construction of a novel Slab system using Bending Active Framework ”, in International fib Symposium on Conceptual Design of Structures, Madrid, September 2019.