AN IMPROVED ALGORITHM FOR CATENARY CABLE ELEMENT

The catenary finite element deduced by H.B. Jayaramanin the 1980's has a high precision compared to other finite cable element.However, when the initial unstressed length of the cable is near thelength of the chord, iteration may be unsuccessful. In this paper, animproved algorithm is presented. The results show that the new methodis effective and can be used in design.