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TENSEGRITY

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Steel bows

Tensegrities don't necessarily have to be made by straight struts. But, made of bended struts, it looses one important charming quality. Normally a tensegrity is a sculpture where "tension" and "compression" (push and pull) are strictly separated within the structure. This nice property gets lost when bended struts are used.

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Inspired by the logo of the Olympic Games I got the idea to make a tensegrity with five hoops. In the end I decided I preferred all the hoops mingled together instead of the olympic formation.

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Stephen M. Levin mentioned in a Fuller discussion group geodesic 00622 the following: "In an ideal tensegrity, tension and compression are separated and struts are pure compression elements. Any column under compression develops internal shear and tends to bow in the middle, re: Euler's buckling law. Theoretically, a strut would have pure compression running straight down its central core and no tensile component, a line with only one dimension, otherwise you would have shear and bending moments that are intolerable in a true tensegrity. Bows are tensed on their convex side and compressed on their concave side, tension and compression are not separated and, therefore, bows cannot be part of true tensegrities..."

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Marcelo Pars