POLITECNICO DI TORINO - DOCTORATE SCHOOL
RESEARCH PROFILES FOR DOCTORAL STUDENTS
DOCTORAL COURSE IN STRUCTURAL ENGINEERING
RESEARCH TOPICS
Thin shells
Shell structures are the most often used structural elements in nature and technology. Their outstanding
success is due to the curvature allowing a thin shell to carry transversal loading primarily by inplane actions
without bending and inextensional deformations, that are detrimental. As a consequence, shell structures
can be designed with an extreme slenderness leading to a high efficiency. In addition, they can also show
architectural beauty, as several examples designed by Dischinger, Torroja, Candela, Nervi, Tedesko, Tsuboi
and Isler among others, may confirm. The shell concept has been exploited by the small scale building
blocks of nature, namely the cells, prestressed by turgor pressure. But it is also carried over to macroscopic
natural structures like blood vessels, bones, petals or egg and nut shells. Modern technology makes use of
the shell principle in innumerable applications like pipes, containments, cooling towers, membrane roofs,
aircraft fuselages or car bodies, to mention only a few, and our daily life is full of smaller and larger shells
structures.
REFERENCE PROFESSOR(S)
Prof. Alberto Carpinteri
http://staff.polito.it/alberto.carpinteri/
INTERNATIONAL AND INDUSTRIAL COOPERATION
RESEARCH GROUP
Prof. Alberto Carpinteri
Dr. Ing. Simone Puzzi
REFERENCE PAPERS
N. B. Questo campo deve contenere l’elenco delle pubblicazioni del gruppo sulle tematiche della linea di
ricerca. Per quelle pubblicazioni che siano accessibili in rete (ad esempio in archivi) agli autori viene chiesta
l’autorizzazione (sempre con una e-mail a ScuDo) a creare un link con la rete in modo da rendere le
pubblicazioni leggibili. Se si ritiene necessario si possono inserire anche referenze di carattere generale.
S. Puzzi, A. Carpinteri: "Design optimization of shell structures by evolutionary algorithms with efficient
constraint handling", in Structural Architecture - Toward the Future Looking to the Past (Proceedings of the
19th IASS Symposium, Venezia, Italy, 2007).
S. Puzzi, A. Carpinteri: "A double-multiplicative dynamic penalty approach for constrained evolutionary
optimization", Structural and Multidisciplinary Optimization, in print.
W.T. D’Arcy: On Growth and Form, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1948, 1116 pp.
H. Isler: “Generating shell shapes by physical experiments”, International Journal of Space Structures, Vol.
34, 1993, pp. 53-63.
D.B. Fogel: Evolutionary Computation: Toward a New Philosophy of Machine Intelligence, Wiley–IEEE
Press, Hoboken, 2006, 274 pp.
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