THE SOLUTION OF DIFFERENTIAL-EQUATIONS GOVERNING THE STATIC ANALYSIS OF A HELICOIDAL SEGMENT

Curvilinear space bars are occasionally used in building civil and mec hanical structures. For safety and/or economical considerations design ers of such structures bear the responsibility of ensuring adequate pe rformance under expected functional requirements. Under specified load conditions the appropriate analytical tools which account for all kin ematic and equilibrium requirements are presented in this paper for a typical helicoidal segment as one of the more general classes of space bars. The governing differential equations of the static response of a helicoid are derived and methods of solving these equations are disc ussed. Finally a transport-function-based solution is presented, imple mented in an example and compared with a displacement-function-based f inite element solution.