Plastic behaviour and stability constraints in the shakedown analysis and optimal design of trusses

Abstract.

A shakedown analysis and optimum shakedown design of elasto-plastic trusses under multi-parameter static loading are presented. To control the plastic behaviour of the truss, bounds on the complementary strain energy of the residual forces and on the residual displacements are applied and for the bars under compression critical stresses updated during the iteration are taken into consideration. The formulation of problems is suitable for nonlinear mathematical programming which is solved by the use of an iterative procedure. The application of the method is illustrated by three test examples.