This paper investigates the characteristics of unstable behaviour and critical buckling load by joint rigidity of framed large spatial structures which are sensitive to initial conditions. To distinguish the stable from the unstable, a singular point on equilibrium path and a critical buckling level are computed by the eigenvalues and determinants of the tangential stiffness matrix. For the case study, a two-free node example and a folded plate typed long span example with 325 nodes are adopted, and these adopted examples' nonlinear analysis and unstable characteristics are analyzed. The numerical results in the case of the two-free node example indicate that as the influence of snap-through is bigger; that of bifurcation buckling is lower than that of the joint rigidity as the influence of snap-through is lower. Besides, when the rigidity decreases, the critical buckling load ratio increases. These results are similar to those of the folded-typed long span example. When the buckling load ratio is 0.6 or less, the rigidity greatly increases.

The structural system that discreterized from continuous shells is frequently used to make a large space structures. As well these structures show the unstable phenomena when a load level over the limit load, and snap-through and bifurcation are most well known of it. For the collapse mechanism, rise-span ratio, element stiffness and load mode are main factor, which it give an effect to unstable behavior. In our real situation, most structures have semi-rigid joint that has middle characteristic between pin and rigid joint. So the knowledge of semi-rigid joint is very important problem of stable large space structure. And the instability phenemena of framed space structures show a strong non-linearity and very sensitive behavior according to the joint rigidity For this reason In this study, we are investigating to unstable problem of framed structure with semi-rigidity and to grasp the nonlinear instability behavior that make the fundamental collapse mechanism of the large space frame structures with semi-rigid joint, by proposed the numerical analysis method. Using the incremental stiffness matrix in chapter 2, we study instability of space structures.