Tension structures are increasingly in demand due to their ability to span large distances with elegance and structural efficiency. Tensile membrane structures are designed to carry the external actions through the in-plane membrane prestress and the anticlastic surface curvature. The determination of optimal form of the structure which satisfies the constraints of both architectural and mechanical requirements is a challenge for the designer. This paper is focused on the form-finding analysis of a tensile membrane structure using dynamic relaxation with kinetic damping. The dynamic relaxation method is a robust numerical scheme for solving nonlinear structural mechanics problems. A nonlinear finite element analysis with large displacement and small strain formulation is described here and the numerical implementation of the form-finding analysis is illustrated.

Keywords: Form-finding, Dynamic relaxation, Anticlastic, Prestress, Kinetic damping, Tensile membrane.