MINIMUM-DEFORMATION-SHAPE OF TENSION STRUCTURES

Abstract

A tension structure is usually very deformable,especially when it is subject to asymmetrical loadings.For a tenseion structure with a certain configuration and subjected to a certain loading system, the amounts of the nodal displacements and consequently its rigidity as a whole are very sensitive to its original shape and the state of prestressing. So the issue of finding the optimum shape and the state of prestressing for a maximum rigidity is of particular interest. With a purpose of minimizing the nodal displacement-vector, a nonlinear programming method, gradient projection method, is adopted in the present paper to find the optimum nodal coordinates, member section areas and the distribution of prestresses. A simple tensegrity frame is taken as a numerical example, the result of which shows that the nodal displacements can be reduced to so far as 30% or 50% of the initial values.