A Software Development Of Form-Finding For Tensegrity Structure

The conception of the tensegrity was proposed by Fuller, a famous American architect. Geiger invented cable-dome on the base of Fuller's tensegrity-dome, thus made the conception of tensegrity used in the architectural engineering for the first time. Tensegrity structure can achieve very large span in theory and the unite area deadweight cost doesn't increase much when the span increases. Nowadays, studies on tensegrity are proceeding all over the world, there is an extremely wide foreground on its application in the architectural engineering and it was forecasted one of the most fascinate structural systems.The history and present conditions of the studies on the tensegrity were introduced, especially its structural characteristics. Several form-finding methods for tensegrity are advanced and disadvantages of these methods are compared. Form-finding of tensegrity with nonlinear finite element method is roundly expounded in this article. Some methods are given to solve the problem that FEM program commonly doesn't converge when finding the form of tensegrity. The software of form-finding for tensegrity structure is developed.The core calculation part of this software is compiled by VC++. It is an object-oriented program with node class, keypoint class, element class, one-dimensional bandwidth class, triangle matrix class and so on. The program is easily secondary exploited and bring forth its superiority on the side of object-oriented. Adopting the geometry non-linear FEM calculation theory and iteration method to calculate, by which much time is saved.The visualization part of this software is achieved by OpenGL language. The software provides preprocess and post process to make the interface friendlier and offers some files to help learn it.There is an example to prove the accurate of this software;also some examples were given to explain the utility of this software.