A novel numerical method for form-finding analysis of branching structures

Abstract

Branching structures are beginning to draw the engineering designer’s attention for their novel appearance and high structural efficiency. Detailed form-finding analysis is important for branching structures and there are few applicable methods for this kind of analysis. A novel numerical method was proposed based on this research background. Double-element method was firstly introduced and the iterative program was proposed. Then the accuracy and reliability of the proposed method were validated by existing research results. The proposed method was utilized for form-finding analysis of three different kinds of tree structures. Results indicated that the proposed method was highly efficient in dealing with form-finding analysis of tree structures. In addition, the proposed method was easy and convenient to be adopted.