"Four-Season-Arch" Luxury Camping Tent, USA
Customer Project
The company Under Canvas provides the unique opportunity for all-inclusive adventure glamping (glamorous camping). Established in 2009, the company has since grown to include multiple luxury glamping resorts and customized events all over the country.
Owner |
Under Canvas Bozeman, Montana, USA www.undercanvas.com |
Structural Engineer |
Modular Structural Consultants, LLC. Plano, Texas, USA www.modularconsultant.com |
Model
The Under Canvas safari-inspired tents look to reduce environmental impact while still delivering a luxurious camping experience. Operating in many beautiful and well-known national parks and monuments throughout the USA, the safari-inspired tents give campers the ability to sleep soundly and ready to explore nature by morning.
Structure
The Four-Season-Arch is a beautiful centerpiece tent for luxury camping resorts. It has a unique aesthetic shape. The tent may consist of one pod or multiple pods. Each pod has three equal sides. Each side is framed with a glulam timber arch, spanning about 26 feet long with an arch rise approximately 10 feet high positioned at a slight tilt. The three side arches are held together with horizontal timber beams. Round posts, measuring around 24 feet long each, are placed at the center of the horizontal timber beams, forming the pointed tipi tent appearance at the center pod. Two 10 foot awning poles are positioned at the entry doors.
Heavy duty membrane fabric covers the pod framing and forms the conical-dome tent shape. The tent access opening can be opened or closed with fabric as well. RFEM and the RF-FORM FINDING add-on module were used in the structural analysis and design of the structure including determining the shape of the tensile fabric under applied prestress forces.
Determining the design wind load is challenging for the Four-Season-Arch's unusual structure shape. The only way to produce an accurate wind load for this tent is either by actual wind tunnel testing or by wind tunnel simulation software. RWIND Simulation by Dlubal Software was the chosen program to perform the wind analysis on the tent structure. RF-TIMBER AWC was used to design the tent wood structures according to the American standards.
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New
Aluminum Design Manual (ADM) 2020 Updates in RF-/ALUMINUM ADM
The Aluminum Design Manual (ADM) 2020 was released in February 2020. The ADM 2020 gives guidance for both the allowable strength design (ASD) and load and resistance factor design (LRFD) for aluminum members to ensure reliability and safety for all aluminum structures.

Display of Topology on Deformed Structure
With the activated option "Topology on form-finding shape" in the Project Navigator - Display, the model display is optimized based on the form-finding geometry. For example, the loads are displayed in relation to the deformed system.
- How do I model a suspended membrane roof structure with line supports?
- How do I model a tent roof with two cone tips?
- How can I get the member end forces to design the connections?
- I would like to calculate and design "temporary structures." What do I need for this?
- I have already divided my membrane roof into individual surfaces. Can I quickly create a cutting pattern from these surfaces?
- How is an inflatable object simulated in RFEM?
- How can I define a material allowance at the edge of a cutting pattern?
- I have modeled a structure made of outer and inner cables as well as membranes, and get a message about instability or the error message "Jacobi matrix is not positive definite" in the RF‑FORM‑FINDING add-on module. What should I do?
- Why does the FE mesh of my conical membrane look like angular after the form-finding?
- How to model a cable net structure in using the RF-FORM-FINDING add-on module?
Programs Used for Structural Analysis