Abstract
Space structures can be said to be correctly designed if they are found to resist against external design loads mainly through their strong capability for membrane stress resultants. Up to now, there have been several attempts to create the bending free shapes which enable us to realize rational shapes for space structures and shells both experimentally and theoretically such as the works by H. Isler, N. F. Ortega and our previous researches as well. Present paper deals with minimization process by which bending free surface for shell structures can be directly obtained through application of the nonlinear programming technique for the objective function which is composed of bending moments components. Axisymetric shells are shown as numerical examples, where effectiveness and usefulness of present treatment are clearly appealed and some investigations on the mechanism through which bending free structures are created are also discussed.
