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Whatever the weather

With tight TV schedules and ever increasing expectations from spectators, delayed starts and cancellations for sporting events have become a lot less acceptable. As a result, many stadia are now being constructed with retractable roofs, not only to cope with such demands but also to provide multipurpose facilities that have the versatility required to make them financially viable in the longer term.

Frank Jensen, a PhD student working with Professor Sergio Pellegrino and Professor Chris Calladine in the Deployable Structures Laboratory has come up with some rather stylish schemes for the next generation sporting venues and stadia:

“The ideas generated in the deployable structures laboratory have led to a couple of novel concepts. We first took an existing deployable structure and developed it into a flat roof structure consisting of two identical layers of plates interconnected using simple cylindrical joints. This unique looking roof is able to open and close in a manner similar to that of an iris of a camera lens but, importantly, friction is greatly reduced, as there is no contact between the plates.”

“I am now working on a related solution for a sphere. The idea is to use the inherent structural strength and stiffness of the dome shape to help us to span the full width and length of a stadium effectively.”

There are a number of other possible applications for this type of structure, (as is often the case when a good idea is involved). For example, a micromechanics application would be for a tissue sampling machine – using sharp blades to form the rigid plates, the sphere could be closed to slice off a delicate sample of tissue, which could then be transferred directly to other equipment for testing, thus avoiding contamination. This concept is being pursued together with researchers at the Technical University of Delft, The Netherlands.

Meanwhile, there are those of us who would just like to see Wimbledon continue without rain stopping play!

For further details of this work and to view animations of the retractable roof concept, please visit the DSL web site on: http://www-civ.eng.cam.ac.uk/dsl/roof/