A macroelement method for catenary mode analysis

A striking feature of all sorts of catenaries is that they are composed of periodic repetitive substructures. Making use of this feature and the symmetry of the structures, we proposed a macroelement of originality and the coherence dynamic stiffness matrix of the macroelement was formed, based on the solution of beam and flexible cable elements by the boundary element method. A general dynamic analysis procedure for catenaries was also given. Such a method could greatly decrease the costs of computation as the structure would still be treated as one continuous body. On the basis of this paper a computer program SIMULA3.0, that could analyse the modes of all sorts of catenaries, was developed. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.