Calculation of cable total displacements considering complex conditions

Abstract

A deformable response of cable structures, designed according to design codes, can be described in terms of total displacements in terms of elastic and kinematic their components. The most dangerous loading case for cable is an asymmetric one, obtained when a part of distributed loads is located in its half span. The cable, subjected to such load, changes its primary geometric shape of quadratic parabola when adapting to asymmetric loads. One deals with nonlinearity evaluation problem when calculating the total displacements of a cable, especially when the effect of horizontal displacement of support (actually met in practice), conditioned by the flexibility of supports, is taken into account. Current investigation is referred to cable deformable behaviour analysis, splitting its displacements into elastic and kinematic ones. Revised analytical expressions to calculate kinematic displacements for loaded and unloaded cable parts have been obtained. A method to evaluate cable total displacements is proposed taking into account the flexibility of supports. Numerical analysis results have also been presented herein.