Advanced form-finding for cable-strut structures

Abstract

A numerical method is presented for form-finding of cable-strut structures. The topology and the types of members are the only information that is required in this form-finding process. Dummy members are used to transform the cable-strut structure with supports into self-stressed system without supports. The requirement on rank deficiencies of the force density and equilibrium matrices for the purpose of obtaining a non-degenerate d-dimensional self-stressed structure has been explicitly discussed. The spectral decomposition of the force density matrix and the singular value decomposition of the equilibrium matrix are performed iteratively to find the feasible sets of nodal coordinates and force densities which satisfy the minimum required rank deficiencies of the force density and equilibrium matrices, respectively. Based on numerical examples it is found that the proposed method is very efficient, robust and versatile in searching self-equilibrium configurations of cable-strut structures.