The Redundancy Matrix as a Performance Indicator for Structural Assessment

TL;DR

This paper introduces the redundancy matrix as a novel performance indicator for structural assessment, focusing on static indeterminacy distribution to evaluate robustness and assemblability, especially useful in early design stages.

Contribution

It presents a new matrix-based approach to assess structural robustness and assemblability using the redundancy matrix, with detailed derivations and practical examples.

Findings

Redundancy matrix effectively characterizes load-bearing structure properties.

Performance indicators derived from the redundancy matrix inform design robustness.

Application examples demonstrate the method's practical utility.

Abstract

The degree of static indeterminacy and its spatial distribution characterize load-bearing structures independent of a specific load case. The redundancy matrix stores the distribution of the static indeterminacy on its main diagonal, and thereby offers the possibility to use this property for the assessment of structures. It is especially suitable to be used in early planning stages for design exploration. In this paper, performance indicators with respect to robustness and assemblability are derived from the redundancy matrix. For each of the performance indicators, a detailed matrix-based derivation is given and the application is showcased with various truss examples.