Thin-walled shell structures made of textile-reinforced concrete - Part I: Structural design and construction

At RWTH Aachen University recently, a pavilion was constructed with a roof shell made of textile-reinforced concrete (TRC), a composite material consisting of a fine-grained concrete and high-strength, non-corroding textile reinforcement in the form of carbon fibres. The thin-walled TRC shell structure demonstrates impressively the loadbearing capacity of this innovative composite material. The present paper discusses the practical issues concerning the construction, such as the fabrication of the TRC shells using shotcrete, the concepts developed for the arrangement of the textile reinforcement and the erection of the shells on top of the precast concrete columns. The issues concerning the design, assessment and numerical simulation of the loadbearing behaviour of TRC shells are presented in the companion paper (Part II).