Hello, I have recently used section wizard to create a built-up section. I have found that for plates Section Wizard has assigned a Modulus of Elasticity of 2.08871e-315 (essentially zero), while for the w-section it is 205 (see first snip below). As a result, section wizard only returns values for the original w-section and ignores properties of the plate. I have found if I manually change the plate Modulus of Elasticity to 205 (match the w-section), this resolves the issue and returns combined section properties for the built-up member (see second snip below).
I have compared this to a section I created a couple months ago and found this was not occurring previously.
I have 2 questions:
1) Is there a way to reset or change the default plate Modulus of Elasticity?
2) How does section wizard calculate section properties? I would not expect geometric section properties to be changed by material properties?
It seems that plate is ignored in case of such a low value of E. This looks like a glitch to me. Could you please attach that Section Wizard file to check it at our end?
Hi Modestas, Thank you for the reply. I have asked 2 of my colleagues to try as well, and they both had the same Modulus of Elasticity issue.
See attached file below. Apologies the forum would not let me attach the .sec file. I had to create a zip (.7z) file for it to allow me to upload. please take a look.
Test.7z
Thank you. I performed some internal research and it appears that there is a Bug in the application which reads E value for some compound parts incorrectly, which somehow affects the calculation of sectional properties (Bug #993205). I believe that this issue is going to be fixed in the next STAAD.Pro release. In the meantime, use the Other material type with the same E value as for remaining parts of the section to get the correct sectional properties.
Thank you for the reply Modestas. This is what we have been doing to obtain the correct section properties from Section Wizard. Are you able to provide any information regarding why this causes the program to ignore the section with the near zero elastic modulus? As mentioned previously, I would not expect the section properties to be affected by the material properties?
Yes, it should not affect the sectional properties. I am not sure exactly what causes it in the source code.