Textile Composites and Inflatable Structures

This book collects state-of-the-art research and technology for design, analysis, construction and maintenance of textile and inflatable structures.Textile composites and inflatable structures have become increasingly popular for a variety of applications in among many other fields civil engineering, architecture and aerospace engineering. Typical examples include membrane roofs and covers, sails, inflatable buildings and pavilions, airships, inflatable furniture, airspace structures etc.The book contains 18 invited contributions written by distinguished authors who participated in the International Conference on Textile Composites and Inflated Structures held in Barcelona from June 30th to July 2nd, 2003. The meeting was one of the Thematic Conferences of the European Community on Computational Methods in Applied Sciences (ECCOMAS).The different chapters discuss recent progress and future research directions in membrane and inflatable structures built with new textile composite materials. Approximately half of the book focuses on describing innovative numerical methods for structural analysis of such structures, such as new nonlinear membrane and shell finite elements. The rest of the chapters present advances in design, construction and maintenance procedures.