Conceptual Design of Cable-Stayed Bridges Using Graphic Simulation

Abstract

The paradigm for structural design has been shifted from traditional engineering-oriented to more comprehensive holistic designs that consider visual aspects. Such trends need an integrated strategy to design a structure that follows force flow resulting in a pleasing visual appearance. Graphic statics is perfect for designing structural forms while visualizing structural behavior. Despite the advantages of graphic statics, there are limitations to its use manually in conceptual design, where various design alternatives must be created and compared. The objective of this study is to present the conceptual design of cable-stayed bridges by exploiting the novelty of graphic statics. It also focuses on the rapid prototyping of computer-supported design to overcome the problem of tedious and iterative manual tasks. The generation of form and force diagrams for some representative cable-stayed bridges is first discussed. This is for parametric modeling to generate structural forms with genetic information and to develop into a family of design alternatives by varying the values for predefined input parameters. Then, the information and tasks involved in the development of the form and force diagrams are formalized by using the concept of entity-based model for the computer-supported graphic simulation. The formalized entities are further implemented into the generative algorithms of graphics software that link form and force diagrams through dynamic binding. It is expected that the implemented design tool support designers to perform conceptual design iteratively and interactively by considering structural behaviour and visual silhouette in a balanced way.