Structural evaluation of a foldable cable-strut structure for kinematic roofs

The rapidly decreasing natural resources and the global variation of the climate push us to find intelligent and efficient structural systems to provide more people with fewer resources. This paper proposed a kinematic cable-strut system to realize sustainable structures in responding to changing environmental conditions. At first, the concept of the kinematic system based on crystal-cell pyramid (CP) cable-strut unit was given. Then the deployment of the structure was studied experimentally. After that, the static behaviors in the fully deployed state under the symmetric and asymmetric load cases were investigated. Moreover, the effects of thermal loading and the initial prestress distribution were also discussed. Comparative studies between the proposed structure and other deployable cable-strut system under three times of design load cases were carried out. Finally, the robustness of the system was studied by removal of one passive cable at one time.