Displacement control of prestressed structures Original Research Article

The method proposed in this paper allows displacement control of prestressed truss/cable network structures by altering the length of some of structural members while keeping the prestress level above a given lower bound. It consists of two phases: (i) to select a set of members capable of length variation so that any displacements within a given region can be achieved by actuation of these members; and (ii) to calculate the amount of actuation to achieve a particular displacement in that region. The approach is based on the force method and for small linear elastic deformation only. The method can be easily extended to a wider range of other structures. A test has been carried out on a two-dimensional truss and the results obtained corresponded well with the computational prediction. The applications of this method include the shape control of precision structures.