Tensile structure / form finding foftware

[glass99]

Does anyone have recommendations on tensile structure software? I am thinking about fabric and cablenet structures.

The free packages including the Rhino plugins seem to have capabilities which are only marginally less than the very expensive commercial packages like Membrane.

We run Strand for FE and Rhino already.

 

[asixth]

Any free package would be a waste of time. It is a specialist field of engineering, I remember Birdair and Makmax developing propriety software which a company that I use to work for was using. I can't remember the name now. GSA also has some functionality for tensile structures.

 

[glass99]

Thanks asixth. Yes, GSA has some pretty significant capability in respect to tensile structures. We are considering purchasing it. But my understanding is that if you do formfinding in Kangaroo/Grasshopper/Rhino and final analysis in regular non-linear geometry FEA its the same thing. The formfinding step is kind of this "artistic" step anyway, and I don't want to be too beholden to any particular software in that respect.

A guy from Birdair spun off a number of years ago to sell Membrane. Its very efficient and integrated for the formfinding to analysis to drawings I think, and I know a number of people who swear its the greatest thing ever. But I view it more as an efficiency tool for tensile structure contractors who do it all day long. It also costs $40,000. There are some German packages which do a similar thing at a similar price.