ABSTRACT
Cable nets often consist of two families of pretensioned elastic cables intersecting each other at right angles when viewed in plan, with each cable being curved in a vertical plane [1, 2]. Although cable nets are generally considered to be geometrically nonlinear structures and usually analysed as such [3-6], their load-deformation response under certain conditions may be approximately linear (permitting a linear analysis), or if not, essentially linear techniques may be used to overcome the nonlinear effects [1, 7, 8].
