Data processing, analysis, and evaluation methods for co-design of coreless filament-wound building systems

The linear design workflow for structural systems, involving a multitude of iterative loops and specialists, obstructs disruptive innovations. During design iterations, vast amounts of data in different reference systems, origins, and significance are generated. This data is often not directly comparable or is not collected at all, which implies a great unused potential for advancements in the process. In this paper, a novel workflow to process and analyse the data sets in a unified reference frame is proposed. From this, differently sophisticated iteration loops can be derived. The developed methods are presented within a case study using coreless filament winding as an exemplary fabrication process within an architectural context. This additive manufacturing process, using fiber-reinforced plastics, exhibits great potential for efficient structures when its intrinsic parameter variations can be minimized. The presented method aims to make data sets comparable by identifying the steps each data set needs to undergo (acquisition, pre-processing, mapping, post-processing, analysis, and evaluation). These processes are imperative to provide the means to find domain interrelations, which in the future can provide quantitative results that will help to inform the design process, making it more reliable, and allowing for the reduction of safety factors. The results of the case study demonstrate the data set processes, proving the necessity of these methods for the comprehensive inter-domain data comparison.