The idea was to have a portable and foldable structure that when folding in place become a cover for the pelgrims for the Santiago de Compostela Road.
It could be folded into to a single component size for an easy transportation.
Our based was a structure made with two layers of fabric and one interior layer of cardboard for support using the fabric as joints and tensors to secure it in place.
From this basic structure we set two main goals:
- to reduce the weight of the structure
- keep using the fabric as the joints
Test 1:
We decided to lighten the structure by making holes in the interior pieces, that way we could reduce the amount of material in half, but keeping the structural performance the same. We built a small scale prototype with fabric and plywood and the test was satisfactory.
Test 2:
Thinking in the big scale prototype we decided to reduce the size of the triangles, filling one half with plywood and keeping the other with just fabric. We also build a small scale prototype that was also working well.
Test 3:
We decided to merge the idea of the previous tests and replace the wood triangles into wooden sticks to keep the same rigidity, keeping the fabric as the joints and adding the tensors for holding it in place. We decided to split the triangles in two as test 2 to add more support to the structure. We build a small prototype of just one component to test the joints.
Test 4:
For our final test before building the prototype, we decided to test the fabric joints, to make sure they will hold the structure. Beside putting fabric we decided to used plastic straps to hold the fabric in place.
Final Result:
Building big scale was a big challenge for us. The few problems we faced were that we couldn’t test the structure until complited. The structure didn’t hold in place even with the tensils fixed. The legs of the structure weren’t rigid enough to hold the upper part and it collapsed.
Conclusions:
For further research we will change the length of the sticks in the support legs of the structure. It’s needed cause they bend due the weight of the fabric and structure itself.
Instead of having two separated wood bars we will replace it with a single bar maybe enlarging the diameter.
The joints were performance well in a matter of holding the bars in place but we need to calculate the exact spaced needed to achieve the specific folding degree that we need and no more
than that.
Link to Video: