RESEARCH ARTICLE


Suspen-Dome System: A Fascinating Space Structure



IfeOlorun Olofin*, Ronggui Liu
Department of Civil Engineering, Jiangsu University, 301 Xuefu Road Zhenjiang, Jiangsu Province, China


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Creative Commons License
© 2017 Olofin and Liu

open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

* Address correspondence to this author at the Department of Civil Engineering, Jiangsu University, 301 Xuefu Road Zhenjiang, Jiangsu Province, China; Tel: +86 18652726384; E-mail: epher2002@yahoo.com


Abstract

With the recent trend in long span space structures, suspen-dome as a roof structure is becoming popular. Therefore, as the construction of long span structures increases in the world today, the effectiveness of suspen-dome structure should be considered in order to undertake further development of the system which may be required to improve its design and construction. One direction of the improvement of such structures is to seek new materials other than using the traditional steel to yield better results. This paper is a review of the suspen-dome system, including its characteristics, its use in space construction, its success as well as the possibility of replacing steel with other materials for better results. From the review, it is found that using steel cables in suspen-dome structure has some shortcomings which can be eliminated by the use of other materials. It is suggested that Carbon Fibre Reinforced Polymer (CFRP) can be the material because of its advantages over steel as indicated in the paper.

Keywords: Space structures, Suspen-dome, Prestressing structures, Carbon fibre reinforced polymer cables, Projects.