The paper considers method of determination of solar radiation amount falling on arbitrarily oriented surface of a structure. Provided method allows calculation of influence of structure’s geographical coordinates, spatial orientation of structure’s surface, day of year and time of day on received amount of solar radiation. The method is intended for determination of thermal stresses and deformations of sheet steel structures caused by action of direct solar radiation. Examples show usage of provided method.

In the paper, a solution to the problem of elastic deformation of thin-walled shell structures with complex shapes within the theory of geometrically non-linear shells has been presented. It is a modification of the Newton-Raphson method. In a variational formulation, the problem is based on a Lagrange’s functional for increments of displacements. The method has been applied to investigations of a harmonic drive, in particular to analysis of the stress state in the flexspline with a variable curvature as well as bearings of the generator. For verification of the obtained results, a more adequate FEM model calculated by ANSYS has been used.

Unlike in conventional bridges, the backfill and the roadway pavement have a major bearing on the load capacity of buried corrugated metal structures. In the soil-steel structure model one can distinguish two structural subsystems: the shell made of corrugated steel plates and the soil backfill with the road pavement. The interaction between them is modelled as a contact (interfacial) interaction, i.e. forces normal and tangent to the surface of the shell. The normal interactions are variable during both construction and service life. Two algorithms are presented. In the first algorithm on the basis of unit strains the internal forces in the shell are determined and consequently the contact interactions are calculated. A large number of measuring points distributed on the circumferential section of the shell is needed for the calculations. In the second algorithm the collocation condition, according to which the result obtained from the shell geometry model must agree with the measured displacement of the structure’s collocation point, is used. When there are more such points, the estimated result is more precise. The advantage of both algorithms is that they take into account the physical characteristics of the soil in the backfill layers, but above all the backfill laying and compacting technology. The results of such analyses can be the basis for comparing the effectiveness of conventional geotechnical models.