Bhavan Domes Technology
N G Bhagavan, Retired Scientist, Center for Innovative Building Technologies (CIBTech), CSIR-SERC, Chennai.
A geodesic dome is a semi-spherical shell structure assembled with a network of circles (geodesics) on the surface of a sphere. The geodesics intersect to form triangular elements that are rigid and distribute the stress all across the structure. Though they are domes due to their shape, they don’t contain curved surfaces! They are constructed by a series of one dimensional (one-D) structural members sequentially arranged as series of plane triangles, to take the shape of a dome.