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Cables have always been under consideration by engineers as a structural element. They have a low weight to strength ratio and they are also economic and these features makes them suitable for applications such as suspension bridges and
roofs, Power transfer lines and so on.
Despite these properties, what makes their analysis difficult is the nonlinear behaviour due to geometry and material nonlinearity. in this work, the equilibrium equations for a Gable network under distributed loading are
derived considering the potential energy of
the system and minimizing it using the variational procedure. Along with it the necessary and sufficient conditions for stability of the equilibrium configuration are obtained. Next a numerical procedure called "Dynamic Relaxation", which considers the equilibrium equations as dynamic equations of motion adding the mass and damping term, is used to solve the
equations numerically. Several examples using this method are presented.