Automatic Form-finding of N-4 Type Tensegrity Structures

Abstract

Numerical form-finding is an effective method for determining the equilibrium configurations of tensegrity structures. However, the connectivity matrix is required to be input as initial data in most form-finding methods, and it is time-consuming and inconvenient for the designer in processing a complex structure with a large number of components. To address this issue, a novel automatic method of generating a connectivity matrix is proposed for three dimensional N-4 type tensegrity structures in this paper. The novelty of our algorithm is that the number of nodes is the only required parameter for the proposed method. Numerical examples are employed to validate our method. The results show that the proposed method is competent inform-finding for three-dimensional N-4 type tensegrity structures in terms of accuracy, efficiency and convergence.

Keywords
Tensegrity; form-finding; force density method; connectivity matrix

Graphical abstract

Graphical abstract