A new technique for optimum cutting pattern generation of membrane structures

In general, the cutting pattern for membrane structures is determined by dividing the complicated curved 3-D surface into several 2-D plane strips by using the geodesic line method or flattening technique. In these procedures, however, some discrepancies can occur between actual stresses of equilibrated state and designed uniform stresses initially. These problems mainly arise from the material property and numerical errors. Such deviations can cause unexpected structural problems, thus a precise consideration in the cutting pattern of membrane structures is needed. In this paper, a new analytical method for determining an optimum cutting pattern considering material properties is presented. The optimization method proposed can diminish the deviations occurring from numerical errors as well as from material properties. From the analysis results of the proposed method, it is shown that the final stress distributions for various models are sufficiently closer to design stress distributions than existing ones.