TY - JOUR AB - Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to present a finite element formulation of enhanced two‐node parabolic cable element for the static analysis of cable structures.Design/methodology/approach– Unlike the assumed polynomial displacement interpolation functions, the present approach uses the analytical cable dynamic stiffness matrix to obtain the explicit expression of the static stiffness matrix of an inclined sagging cable by setting the frequency at zero. The Newton‐Raphson‐based iterative method is used to obtain the solution.Findings– It is demonstrated that the present results agree well with those obtained from the nonlinear analytical theory of a parabolic cable and previous reported methods in the literature.Originality/value– This paper proposes a two‐node parabolic cable element. For comparable accuracy with the truss element method, fewer numbers of such cable elements are needed. VL - 25 IS - 4 SN - 0264-4401 DO - 10.1108/02644400810874967 UR - https://doi.org/10.1108/02644400810874967 AU - Ren Wei‐Xin AU - Huang Meng‐Gang AU - Hu Wei‐Hua PY - 2008 Y1 - 2008/01/01 TI - A parabolic cable element for static analysis of cable structures T2 - Engineering Computations PB - Emerald Group Publishing Limited SP - 366 EP - 384 Y2 - 2024/04/24 ER -