Meshfree analyses of cable-reinforced membrane structures by ALE–EFG method

Abstract

Many large membrane structures have been constructed in these days and large membrane structures are often stiffened by cables for reinforcement of the strength. In the analysis of cable-reinforced membrane structures, there are several complicated problems, such as folding of membrane by cable, sliding of cable on membrane surface and so on. As these problems are hardly analyzed by the finite element method, in this study, a meshfree method based on the element free Galerkin (EFG) method is applied to overcome these problems. In the conventional EFG method, the problem that contains discontinuous slope of displacement cannot be analyzed because the moving least square approximation yields C 1 continuous displacement field without any modification. Additionally, sliding between cable and membrane surface must be considered. In this study, the arbitrary Lagrangian–Eulerian formulation and simple technique using patches with the penalty method are combined and incorporated into the conventional EFG method. The proposed method is applied to the analyses of cable-reinforced membrane structures to demonstrate the potential of the method. Satisfactory results are obtained and the validity of the method is clarified.