Suspen-Domes: Design and Assessment of Progressive Collapse

In the last, nearly three decades, suspen-domes have become popular solutions for covering sports halls, stadiums, and venue halls, particularly in China and Japan. While suspen-domes can be easily constructed and maintained, their application extends the span limits for grid dome systems. Unlike for cable domes, special construction methods are not required, still a more cost-efficient, stiffer, and more robust structure is created for mid- and large-spans. This hybrid spatial structure is composed of an upper single layer dome, and a lower, concentric tensegritic system.

Author

Adam Nagy

This project focuses on the design and collapse resistance of suspen-domes; in the first part of the work a literature review is presented as the preparation for the actual case study of preliminary design and progressive collapse analysis of the dome.

The review discusses the typical design features, the behavior and the applicable acceptance criteria of suspen-domes. Also the aspects of progressive collapse are presented in general and specifically for suspen-domes. A preliminary design study is carried out for a forty-meter spanning trimmed lamella suspen-dome. It has been proven that the global stability is a governing design aspect, the outermost-ring stiffened suspen-dome can fail even with a moderate stress utilization ratio and deflections if the nonlinear stability with the imperfect geometry is not assessed.

The progressive collapse analyses of the work were carried out according to the strategy of limiting the extent of localized failure. In case of most space structures, including suspen-domes, the alternative load path method with the notional member removal is the most viable approach. The first model, consisting of beams only (Han et al., 2015), was found efficient for locating those member configurations of the notional removal, that are mostly likely causing a progressive collapse. On the other hand, a combined beam & shell model was found as safer and more reliable for predicting the stability and integrity of the remaining structure. The results of the two analyses are compared and discussed. Flowcharts of the used methodologies are presented.

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