ABSTRACT
The use of sheet dates back to the early automobile and shipping industries. The relative ease in which the material could be manipulated allowed for it to be shaped and tied back to an underlying structure to form curved fuselage shells. While thin sheet metal is still predominantly used in the automobile industry, it also often used as a building envelope material in construction. Advances in sheet-forming techniques have also allowed the material to be used in the context of free-form architecture. However, due to the complexity of fixation details, free-form facades are generally rationalized as planar surface elements. This research presents a method of integrating facade details directly with free-form thin sheet metal. Cold Metal Transfer (CMT), a welding technique developed by Fronius for the automotive industry, is used in combination with a 6-Axis industrial arm to precisely deposit welded material on top of 0.75mm sheet metal to form stiffening ribs and connectors in a process commonly referred to as Wire Arc Additive Manufacturing (WAAM). The paper outlines welding parameters for minimizing heat input and obtaining ultra-thin welding beads, as well as an adaptive digital design process which integrates touch-sensing to update tool paths to follow pre-bent sheet material. The end result is a series of 0.75mm thin-sheet elements which are stiffened by organic reinforcement patterns with integrated with connection details.
