Inflection - returning agency and architectural principles on geometry for nonstandard productions in mechanical engineering: scientific body development of streamline surfaces of a technical elegance for simulation and advanced manufacturing applications

Abstract

This thesis moves towards a foundation, which explores an industrial means to exploit Baroque dynamic systems for curve and surface modelling for nonstandard envelope productions. This recalls Cache’s Projectiles (2011), which aids in the development of the current thesis title: Inflection: Returning Agency and Architectural Principles on Geometry for Nonstandard Productions in Mechanical Engineering. The research by design/ prototyping process opens discussion in contemporary discourse at the intersection of architecture, manufacturing and mechanical engineering design on “inflection” and its potential use as a geometric/scientific scanning tool for reading implicitly layered-curvatures for prototyping surfaces of nonstandard geometry from a dynamic conception of ballistics Projectile motion.

In this sense, this research develops parametric/generative design techniques between digital design and fabrication, and examples on how dynamic algorithmic design techniques can be leveraged to rethink the relationship between geometry, technology and aesthetics in the fabrication of complex geometry Recent architectural and engineering discourses in the field of computational design for developing complex 3D envelopes lie heavily within automisation of computational algorithms. In other words, automated manufacture is largely absent of geometry and analysis from historical mathematical models in form-generating processes, and foreground “form” capable of becoming continuously variable as the outcome of a computational interface.

This research has a threefold purpose. First, it develops dynamic systems through inflection and Projectile computation simulations as a surface modelling methods. This technical approach to modelling aligns scientific algorithms and provides a philosophy of inflection and a wider interpretation of parametric design through coordinate methods, which are often restrictive in the operative logic of contemporary computing softwares for architectural design and engineering.

Second, it emphasises two categories of inflection as a geometric/scientific scanning tool for capturing and translating trajectories into envelopes that operate from different theories on conics, optics and projective geometry. And third, it provides examples through patented processes of Projectile simulations and high-precision additive manufacturing (AM) 3D printing. This brings a re-evaluation to coordinate-independent form-generating methods powered by automated manufacture and conventional optimisation methods for digital mass-customisation from intricate customisation methods requiring sophisticated levels of craft/geometry.