Synthesis of truss structures with specified fundamental natural frequency

Abstract

Efficient synthesis procedures for minimum weight design of a statically determinate truss structure with fundamental natural frequency are developed. When the truss structural mass is ignored, the synthesis procedure involves the solution of one eigenvalue problem and two systems of linear equations. The synthesis procedure becomes iterative when the effect of structural mass is considered. In this case two sets of linear equations are to be solved during each iteration. It is shown that these linear equations can be solved by decomposing a single matrix. Thus the proposed procedures are very efficient. The effectiveness of the proposed methods is demonstrated by a plane truss example.