Influence of Gliding Cable Joint on Mechanical Behavior of Suspen-Dome Structures

As a new type of spatial structure system, a suspen-dome structure shows good mechanical behavior, because its cable layers with pre-stress do not only improve the stability and stiffness of the top lattice shell of the structure but also decrease the push-out forces to its hoop beam. There are two kinds of connection forms on the common joints among hoop cable, radial cable and struts. One is continuous gliding cable joint where individual cable can move independently at the same joint, and the other one is no-gliding cable joint (discontinuous cable joint) where different cables at the same joint move in the same direction. These two forms will lead to different structural behavior, such as internal force distribution of cable layers when the structure is subjected to half-span loads. In this paper, frozen-heated method (FHM) is employed to analyze this problem. And, the results obtained show that the first joint form can adjust internal forces and decrease the peak value of internal forces of hoop cables and radial cables, while it has little influence on the mechanical behavior of the top lattice shell of the structure.