Future Consideration

We are now looking into extending the results for plates to include envelope results for each plate based on the collection of load cases currently selected (which could also be froma defined envelope) and provide additional contour maps.  

Max or Min Envelope for Plate Center Stress (for selected Load case and Load combination)

There is a real need for users who are working with plate elements.

The current interface only allows the user to see the contours for plate center stress for a selected load case or combination.

However for design engineer it is important to assess the envelope of max or min stresses for particular set of load case or combination.

Currently I'm using a macro to extract the plate center stresses and find the envelope (including wood armers method for combining torsional stresses). But a contour view within STAAD interface would be helpful.

  • Thanks for the consideration.

    You are right, the three options you mentioned are good enough for contour display. There should also an option to choose the set of load cases and load combination that goes into the filtering of Max positive or Max negative values.

  • This is an interesting proposal. I can certainly agree that the result tables can be extended to include an envelope result for each stress type. For example the Plate Centre Stress table. This would report for each plate 4 rows of data, the maximum positive value, the associated load case, the maximum negative value and the associated load case. This is the approach taken in the Beam End Force table.

    However when it comes to displaying this as a contour map, I don't see any clear logic that could apply? Each plate would have 2 values, which should be displayed?  The only sensible solution is that this would need to chose to display from one of3 different options

    1) Display using the maximum absolute of both +ve and -ve values. This would indicate a magnitude of stress, but not really indicate whether the effect is positive or negative.

    2) Display using the Max positive value. This option would only indicate the locations where positive effects are significant.

    3) Display using the Max negative values. This option would only indicate the locations where the negative effects are significant.