Textile Composites and Inflatable Structures

The objective of this book is to collect state-of-the-art research and te- nology for design, analysis, construction and maintenance of textile and in?atable structures. Textile composites and in?atable structures have become increasingly popular for a variety of applications in - among many other ?elds - civil engineering, architecture and aerospace engineering. Typical examples - clude membrane roofs and covers, sails, in?atable buildings and pavilions, airships, in?atable furniture, airspace structures etc. The ability to provide numerical simulations for increasingly complex membrane and in?atable structures is advancing rapidly due to both - markablestrides in computer hardware development and theimproved maturity of computational procedures for nonlinear structural systems. Signi?cant progress has been made in the formulation of?nite elements methods for static and dynamic problems, complex constitutive material behaviour, coupled aero-elastic analysis etc. The book contains 18 invited contributions written by distinguished authors who participated in the International Conference on Textile C- puterandIn?atedStructuresheldinBarcelonafromJune30thtoJuly2nd 2003. The meeting was one of the Thematic Conferences of the European Community on Computational Methods in Applied Sciences (ECCOMAS, www.eccomas.org). The di?erent chapters discuss recent progress and future research dir- tions in new textile composites for applications in membrane and in?atable structures. Approximately half of thebook focusesin describing innovative numerical methods for structural analysis, such as new non linear m- brane and shell ?nite elements. The rest of the chapters present advances in design, construction and maintenance procedures. The content of the di?erent chapters was sent directly by the authors andtheeditorscannotacceptresponsibilityforanyinaccuracies, comments and opinions contained in thetext.