In the mid of the 4th year of my PhD study, I am spending most of my time wrapping up all the relevant contains that I have investigated into a dissertation.
One of the latest investigations is going to be presented at the conference Advances in Architectural Geometry 2020. (The conference has been postponed to April 2021.) The title is “Discretised Airy Stress Functions and Body Forces”. The pre-print version of the manuscript is available on ResearchGate.
Two years ago, I was lucky enough to participate in the conference of AAG2018 at Gothenborg, Sweden. In there, I listened to William Baker’s lecture on polyhedral Airy stress function, which interests and inspires me a lot. One can derive an auto-balance stress tensor field from any continuous surface. If the surface is polyhedral, the represented truss is definitely in a balanced state. The difference of slopes across a crease is the force in the represented bar.
I read quite some reference on Airy stress function. Still, I found all of the polyhedral representations I have encountered neglect body forces. Since part of my PhD is on membrane shells under horizontal body forces; the question of how to discretise the Airy stress function with body force bothers me quite some time. Later I found out that the panels of the discretised stress function shall be curved rather than planar.
Technical details are in the pre-print. I hope everyone and every nation will cope the current pandemic soon and there will be a face-to-face AAG conference in the coming April.
ChiangYC 