Abstract
By its geometrical nonlinearity, the realization of a desired suspension structure depends on the shape-finding procedure. In an actual suspension structure, cable members are usually combined with bending members. For a beam-cable structure, in this study, the displacement method is employed to deal with the structural equilibrium, but in which each cable member is treated as the elastic catenary through a force-method computation. Thereafter an iterative scheme of shape finding is developed for such a mixture of cable and beam members, which is based on the tangent coefficients to change of the cable natural lengths on each updated equilibrium configuration.
