great job man, keep up the good work...

+ just a little question... didn't you have trouble laser cutting the polypropylene sheets? didn't the parts melt or weld with each other?
++ and are the hexagonal parts planar or are they curved a little?

Thanks :)

We were told by the polypropylene salesman that we wouldn't be able to cut it with the laser cutter and that it would melt. But we tried it and made sure to set the laser cutter at a slow speed, and we had no problems really. It did melt a tiny bit along the edges, but you have to inspect it very close to notice. Along the folds we did a very narrow cut allowing us to get a clean fold.

All panels, flaps and offset inner surface are almost 100% planar. We used kangaroo to achieve that. We had planarization forces on everything, including folded edges, so it took a while to converge. In the end everything fits together perfectly and it was a real joy to assemble because of it :).

The polypropylene sheets are only 1.5 mm thick. I could imagine it being difficult to use a laser cutter if we increased thickness. We also tried 2 mm and had no problems with the laser cutter but in the end we wanted to go as light as possible. Maybe if you go higher than 2 mm you start to see problems.

Hi Peter, 

Just another quick question - which supplier did you use for the PP? 

I am directing a AA_Aarhus Visiting School where we will work with discretising meshes based on external stimuli - more information: http://aarhus.aaschool.ac.uk/ 

And we would like to use PP as a material of investigation. I have been looking for different suppliers, but has come up a little short, and would like to know if you would share from where you got your PP.

Thanks in advance

Great project!

Hi Jens,

We got the material from a German company called plastico-kunststoffe. Unfortunately the PP we received was not as strong as the one we had used for our prototypes. The PP we bought was recycled and it turned out to be a lot more brittle than traditional PP. This resulted in folds that would snap unless handled very carefully. So make sure to get the "good" PP.

We got some PP last year bought from bayplastics which we used for another pavilion akin to this one. Those sheet had the same weight and thickness but you could not tear them because it was so ductile. I would definitely go for that quality if you need to do folds.

Søren Jensen's HQ is located in Aarhus. Maybe some of our guys would be interested in joining. It looks really interesting!