Architectural concepts for civil engineering roof systems

Civil engineering roof systems for outdoor environments find use in bazaars, car park areas; outdoor sport facilities and places have been built to protect people or their goods from environmental effects such as sun and heavy rain. Therefore, in this thesis shown architectural concepts for such roofing systems which have great amount of application and each country spends huge volumes of materials to build these roof systems to improve life quality of people in cities. Thus, it is evident that further research on these civil engineering structures has the potential to decrease the cost of these roof systems and build more efficient ones. This study investigates a novel concept in the world called as "tensile structures" used to cover wide outdoor areas. This concept actually combines civil engineering designs and some architectural aspects. Instead of using materials with high stiffness, tensile structures adapt membrane materials to cover wide areas. Cable elements accompany those membranes to transmit the internal forces and stresses to structural columns or ground. Although membrane materials have lower strengths compared to steel, these structures offer flexibility in use, light coverings, lower costs and faster construction time. In order to investigate opportunities of these structures and present some possible configurations of tensile roof systems, special commercial software is used in this thesis, the software named FORTEN 2000 program. Keywords: Tensile structures, roofing, architectural design, structural mechanics