Abstract
Space structures should be designed in such ways that they resist against external design loads including their own weights mainly by their definitely strong capability through 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 space structures can be directly obtained through application of the nonlinear programming technique for the objective function which is composed of bending moment components. Grid shell and latice dome are shown as numerical examples of space frame structures, where effectiveness and usefulness of present treatment are clearly appealed and some investigations on the mechanism through which bending free structures are created and which is peculiar to frame-type structures are also discussed.
