APPLICATION OF VECTOR FORM INTRINSIC FINITE ELEMENT METHOD TO STATIC ANALYSIS OF CABLE DOMES

A cable dome is a new type of efficient spatial structures, which mainly consists of cables and struts. A large displacement even cable slack is easy to happen. In this paper, the static behavior of a cable dome is studied by the Vector Form Intrinsic Finite Element (VFIFE). VFIFE is a recently proposed method based on the combination of the vector mechanics and numerical calculations, different from traditional analysis mechanics and other numerical computational methods. VFIFE derives from a kinematic equation. There is no need to solve any nonlinear equations by calculating the stiffness matrix, very helpful in the analysis of large rigid body motions and large geometrical changes. The fundamentals of this method are summarized first. And the internal force of a cable element is conducted to model the cable dome. Then a simple pendulum and a cable dome are analyzed with the Matlab language program. Numerical results show that VFIFE is useful and reliable in case of analyzing the cable dome structure. Hence, a new approach of nonlinear analyses is provided when the traditional finite element method is hard to converge.