An efficient self-stress design of tensegrity shell structures

Distribution and level of self-stress has a profound impact on the structural behavior of tensegrity systems. The problems associated with self-stress implementation preclude designing tensegrity structures for civil engineering application. To achieve the feasible self-stress state of a tensegrity shell structure, an efficient procedure based on solving an optimization problem in conjunction with multi constraint equations on group subdivisions is presented in the current study. Several tensegrity shell configurations are utilized to demonstrate the capability of the proposed procedure. The method provides superior performance compared with the other conventional methods of obtaining desired self-stress distributions. For a given shell configuration, group division is of paramount importance with respect to the regularity and uniformity of self-stress distributions.