Joint Can and Fatigue Analysis Chord/brace member

I understand that SACS automatically make the largest diameter member or thickest member(if they are the same diameter) to be the chord member at a joint can. Is there a way to force the largest diameter member as the brace member? BRCOVR only allows one to override the brace thickness but not the brace diameter. Would also like this to carry over to fatigue analysis. Thanks!

  • There isn't a way to make the largest diameter the brace member. I will pass this along to the developers as feedback. Note that if we do implement a feature like this, most likely we will require that the user specify all stress concentration factors as these connections will not be valid for traditional parametric SCF equations.

    Regards,

    Geoff

  • Thank you for your response! I am in the situation of checking an existing jacket which one of the X-brace joints has punching shear issue. We want to wrap the brace member with a thicker material to alleviate the punching shear issue. The thicker material hence now has a larger diameter compare to the chord member. Although the punching shear issue is solved, the brace member now became the chord member which changes the load path and leads to fatigue issue to the adjacent joints. Therefore we wanted to know if there's a way to force the thru member a chord member even though it has a smaller diameter than the brace member because we didn't want to change the stress load path. This is for anyone's reference in case anyone is interested to know where this question was coming from.