Alternative conceptual design for hypar large-scale roof

This paper reports on the structural design of a large-scale roof to be located in the Misano World Circuit “Marco Simoncelli”, to partially cover the kart track of the circuit. According to first architectural design, the roof was chosen as an hypar surface. The structure is morphologically similar to well-known wide-span sport-hall examples, but with different static conceptual behaviour. Instead of using a bidirectional cable net, the roof surface has been discretized in transversal rigid steel arches and a set of pre-stressed cables along longitudinal direction. In this configuration, cables are designed to prevent arches buckling. Structural elements are anchored to a steel caisson edge ring, supported by concrete columns. A preliminary analysis addressed the study of how the structural behavior changes according to roof shape variations, with the objective to optimize the structural performances. The structure has been analysed varying the roof shape in order to find an “optimal” form. This work has been carried out by meansof both simplified analytical models and Finite Element models. The reliability of the models has been validated by comparing the results: this resulted in a solid framework of knowledge of thebehaviour of the designed structure. Different geometrical models have been parametrically generated in Grasshopper. Then the structural elements have been sized and their resistance has been assessed.