The present work supplies a stability study of the spatial trusses using a nonlinear elastic formulation, based in the finite elements method, where the second-order effects and the structural geometry changing are considered. Special attention is given to the stiffness matrix and the internal force vector calculations. From thus, it was made a computational implementation for the analysis of the spatial trusses behaviour. At the end of this paper, using structural examples found in the literature, the computational implementation efficacy and the formulation proposed are verified.
Spatial trusses; finite elements method; second-order effects; stiffness matrix; internal force vector
