Complete equilibrium paths for Mises trusses

This paper presents determination of equilibrium paths for Mises trusses with different ratio of height to span. Unsymmetrical deformation modes are considered and the structure is treated as a two DOF system. First, a few special equilibrium configurations are resolved from considerations of free body diagrams. Complete equilibrium paths are determined by solving numerically the governing non-linear equilibrium equations. The stability of possible equilibrium configurations is checked using the second partial derivative test for the total potential energy. The positive definiteness of the appropriate Hessian matrices is checked numerically using the Sylvester criterion.