Development of Mobile App on Structural Glass design

Abstract

Glass is one of the most favoured structural materials used by architects in an increasing manner worldwide, to offer quality and style to their projects, and to offer a modern look. Glass is a powerful material, with high compression strength, and an elevated resistance to chemical abrasion, making glass one of the most durable materials. Android handheld devices have already gathered significant importance and are a part of the everyday life. Android applications offer fast support for countless everyday life activities, and are widely used in the industry and various technological fields. The most common building materials like steel and concrete already have numerous dedicated Android applications to design structures, yet, structural glass has none. The thesis presents the development process of an Android application that aims to help in structural glass design. As there is no such application on the present market, the needed functionalities were specified, developing modules to offer theoretical support, calculation modules, and a structural glass product database for the user. The development process was largely helped by the valuable insights that were made by Arup, represented by Paulo Machado, and by the representatives of Cristalmax, Cruz de Oito, Sika and Sosoares. Available data on structural glass was compiled to form the Knowledge Base, offering an overview of the terminology, technological procedures and design codes used in structural glass design. Multiple structural glass design codes were studied and calculation methods were selected for further implementation. Complex calculation blocks were designed to present solutions and analysis possibilities to various design problems, connecting in the same time every calculation procedure to the pre-design functionality of the Knowledge Base. The architecture of the application was defined and every complex functionality was transposed into an algorithmic form to make the software implementation possible. The application user interface was defined, detailing the input and output methods, and the general design guidelines. The development of the application was done with Android specific development tools under Eclipse, an integrated development environment. The Java object-oriented programming language and Extensible Markup Language (XML) were mostly used through the implementation process to develop the equivalent software code, and finish the process with a running application. Final remarks and future development possibilities were listed to contribute to an eventual further development of the application.