Expanded Mesh: Specified in bold architectural designs, the design community has a new product to play with

by Jonathan McGaha | July 30, 2012 12:00 am

Expanded mesh is gaining popularity in exterior and interior North American architectural design as made evident with recent installations such as BBVA Compass Stadium, The New Museum of Contemporary Art and l’Adresse Symphonique, to name a few. Typically used in industrial applications, this product is giving the design community a new metal media to play with.

 

The manufacturing process of expanded mesh is a very efficient use of the raw materials. The slitting and stretching process, in some instances, allows for up to four times yield from the raw material. This means, one sheet 4 feet wide of raw material expands out to 16 feet of expanded mesh! The expanding process creates a material that is both rigid and flexible while being lighter than the original raw material it was expanded from. The material is capable of spanning up to 5 feet (depending on the mesh style chosen) in the long way of diamond direction due to the truss-like structure created during the expanding process. Additionally, the material’s flexibility in the short way of diamond direction allows the mesh to follow undulating profiles.

 

Expanded mesh can be manufactured in portrait and landscape style sheets. Typical sheet sizes are 5 by 10 feet with the long way of the diamond traveling parallel to the 10-foot width of the sheet. If larger sheet sizes are desired, adjustments to the mesh design can be made by decreasing the strand width or increasing the short way of diamond pitch.

 

Birmingham, Ala.-based AMICO’s APEX01 style expanded aluminum mesh was selected to clad the new BBVA Compass Stadium in Houston, home of the Dynamo Soccer team. The design team from Kansas City, Mo.-based POPULOUS, and installation contractor, Gary, Ind.-based Crown Corr Inc., worked closely with AMICO’s engineering team to determine the correct spacing of fastening clips along with the required spacing of the support structure behind the mesh. Tests were conducted at AMICO’s facility to measure the amount of deflection the mesh could experience before failure. The stainless steel fastening clips, manufactured by Crown Corr, were designed and engineered based on AMICO’s previous successes with engineered expanded mesh systems.

 

AMICO designs, engineers and manufactures architectural expanded mesh systems. This includes, but is not limited to: design of the mesh style, fastening clips and hardware, frame work, various painted or anodized finishes and engineering services. We work directly with the architectural community during the design process to ensure architects recognize what possibilities are attainable with expanded mesh.

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Phil Shevchenko is the architectural products manager at AMICO, Birmingham, Ala. To learn more, visit www.amico-online.com[1].

Source URL: https://www.metalarchitecture.com/articles/know-your-products-expanded-mesh/

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