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B. Kromoser, J. Kollegger:
"Application areas for Pneumatic Forming of Hardened Concrete";
Journal of the International Association for Shell and Spatial Structures, Volume 56 (2015), 3; 187 - 198.

Doubly curved concrete shell structures are strong, material saving structures that can be built with very large diameters. State-of-the-art construction methods for these structures require high labor input. Therefore, such structures will rarely be built unless labor-saving construction methods are developed. A new construction method called the "Pneumatic Forming of Hardened Concrete" has been invented at the Institute for Structural Engineering at the Vienna University of Technology. The idea behind this new construction method is to build concrete shells with double curvature starting from an initially flat plate. During the transformation process, the concrete plate is lifted, and the elements are bent with the aid of a pneumatic formwork until the required curvature is reached. A large-scale experiment on a concrete shell with a 13 m diameter showed the practical applicability of the new construction method. Due to the use of a pneumatic formwork the proposed building method is limited in its applicable range. This paper provides an overview of the production process and defines the boundary conditions for the shell design, focusing on analytically describable and free-form surfaces.

free-form shell structure, pneumatic formwork, concrete shell structures, construction methods, Gaussian curvature