Morphological analysis of suspend-dome structures and practical analysis method

Morphological analysis aims to determine the geometry of a suspend-dome under zero state and the corresponding pre-strain. According to the need for determining the respective state parameters under zero state, morphological analysis problems are divided into three categories, i.e., force finding, form finding and both force and form finding, which almost contain all the sub-cases involved in the morphology of suspend-domes. Analytic formulae for force finding and form finding are derived through numerical analysis, and both force and form finding are achieved through associating force finding with form finding. Furthermore, a combined flow chart of algorithm is designed to describe the real processes. A typical morphological analysis of the structures is carried out by using the force finding and both the force and form finding methods. The results show that force finding is necessary for suspend-domes due to the fact that the forces, which is recovered from the pre-strain under zero state, are different from the internal forces at initial state in both magnitudes and distributions after the internal forces are redistributed. The element blanking length after form finding is almost equal to that under known geometry, whereas the deflections are obvious for some nodes under the two states. It is suggested that the element blanking length may be calculated according to known geometry, while the structure should be assembled in terms of the results after form finding.