A study on fabric design of the Seoul Southwestern Baseball Dome

The Seoul Southwestern Baseball Stadium is the first domed baseball stadium in Korea, located at the heart of a busy commercial area in the south-west district of Seoul. The dome of this stadium with a size of 157 m (width) x 214 m (length) x 30 m (height) has an irregular shape which is, however, symmetric to major axis, and it is composed of a steel space frame and a membrane structure. This study aims to establish the structural design process for the fabric of the dome using geometrically nonlinear analysis. Firstly, an equilibrium-finding analysis is performed to obtain the optimal shape of the membrane structure for the required initial stress that each element should have. Such modeling and pattern generation are a very important step toward the form finding of the membrane and thus are described in detail in this paper. Secondly, a stress deformation analysis is performed to analyze the behavior of the membrane. Two models are analyzed: one that is only composed of membrane panels between the support steel arches and the other one that includes prestressed valley cables in the central section of each membrane panel. The models are subjected to downward and uplift loadings, and finally, stress and safety factor are compared between the models.