Tensile Structure Software Services

M_E+C office offers its own well-established experience to elaborate the fabric 3D form designed with TensilDraw and obtain useful data on patterning, load and stress analysis.

Pattern cutting

M_E+C knowledge in patterning allows the setting of pattern cut lines in the correct position to optimize the material properties and obtain pattern shapes which are functional to structural elements placement.

Compensation

All fabric materials suffer a deformation when stressed. Our software applications are able to take this into account before cutting the patterns which can be resized, completed by reinforcements and sent to the cutting step with the correct dimensions for the final structural shape.

Wind Load Analysis

Tensile structures are particularly sensible to wind load due either to their often large surface area and the lightness of the fabric material. M_E+C offers a CFD analysis of wind loads based on TensileDraw 3D mesh. This gives the possibility of obtaining pressure distribution and velocity flow field values in correspondence to every mesh node, and then use these loads for a stress analysis of the structure.

Stress and Deformation Analysis

The various properties that TensileDraw can set to mesh elements (competence area, elastic module, force density, etc..) can be easily exported into stress analysis software format. In this way it's possible to take into account the orthotropic behaviour of the fabric membrane when different kinds of loads are applied to it (wind, snow, localized loads) and calculate the material stress and deformation values. These are fundamental data to proceed with the structural design of the project.