Initial Prestressed Analysis And Ultimate Capacity Of Cable Domes

Cable dome is a highly efficient new tensegrity structure, which makes full use of the tensile strength of cables. Combined with the advantages of novel modeling, economic cost, ingenious conception, this type of structure has attracted great attention in home and abroad since it came into being. Researches on form-finding, static and dynamic behavior analysis, construction form finding technology of the system are also carried out extensively. But those researches are mainly based on that cable slack is the criteria for structure failure, the structural behavior after one or some cables become slack or ruptured is little involved. Some research work is carried out in this paper concerning force-finding and limit bearing capacity.Force-finding is the basis of the research on cable dome. APDL language in ANSYS is programmed for iterated force-finding in this paper. Its modeling is convenient and visualization is strong. This method has little iteration times and high accuracy to meet force-finding requirements of various cable dome forms.Structural behavior of cable-strut exit-working in bird-nest cable dome has not seen in relevant literature. Bearing properties of non-grid-jumping and grid-jumping in bird-nest cable dome structure after inner spinal cable slack or single cable-strut break are analyzed by nonlinear finite element method. The importance of various cable-strut is arranged, and a method to determine the structure damage is given.Existing studies suggest that any cable breaking will lead to the destruction of entire structure in Geiger cable dome. The conclusion is not identical in this paper through nonlinear finite element analysis. Performance after part of the cable slack as well as single cable-strut break subject to full cross and half cross load cases of Geiger cable dome are analyzed by this paper. Mechanical properties are drawn under ultimate bearing state.At the end of the paper, some conclusions are summarized and the problems that should be studied further are put forward.