It is common to have a plates (usually galvanized steel or stainless steel) in the corners of the perimeter of the textile membranes.

See the blog post: Corner plates.

The function of this plate is double:

  1. On one hand it reinforces an area of the membrane where normally stresses are to strong for the fabric resistance.
  2. It also serves to collect pocket cables or webbings. If what we have is just a constructive rope (keder), we can also solve it with the corner plate, but in this case it is less important, since the keder does not perform any structural task.

There are a number of types of anchor plates. The shape and dimensions depend on:

  1. Aesthetic design
  2. Loads to withstand
  3. Lighten the weight
  4. Type of anchor plate of the external structure
  5. Method of connecting border cables
  6. Existence of load belts parallel to the edges, for prestressing longitudinal edge
  7. etc.

IMPORTANT NOTE:

It is desirable to create corner plates after analyzing the structure, since the dimensions of the plate depend on the loads to which it is subjected. If we have several load combinations, surely we will get separate plates in each scenario, therefore you will need to choose the most resistant of them.

WinTess facilitates this work through the menu Other | Corner plates. Pressing this menu opens the window of corner plates:

In this window, we can see the corner plates generated by the program.

To generate a plate, the following criteria are needed:

  1. That the node is in the class “vertex”. (If the program has not done it automatically, we can edit that node and secure the class).
  2. That at least two border cables or headline are available at that node. It does not create plates between rigid tube and border cable.

Once the corner plates are created, as we have the necessary references, we can now export them to DXF to modify using a CAD program.