Geometrical nonlinear elasto-plastic analysis of tensegrity systems via the co-rotational method

•An efficient algorithm for nonlinear elasto-plastic analysis of tensegrities is presented.•Large displacement is decomposed into a rigid body motion and a pure small deformation.•A new form of tangent stiffness matrix is derived based on the CR approach.•The influence of the self-stress level on the behavior of tensegrity grid is discussed.

An efficient finite element formulation is presented for geometrical nonlinear elasto-plastic analyses of tensegrity systems based on the co-rotational method. Large displacement of a space rod element is decomposed into a rigid body motion in the global coordinate system and a pure small deformation in the local coordinate system. A new form of tangent stiffness matrix, including elastic and elasto-plastic stages is derived based on the proposed approach. An incremental-iterative solution strategy in conjunction with the Newton-Raphson method is employed to obtain the geometrical nonlinear elasto-plastic behavior of tensegrities. Several numerical examples are given to illustrate the validity and efficiency of the proposed algorithm for geometrical nonlinear elasto-plastic analyses of tensegrity structures.