Applies To
	Product(s):	STAAD.Pro
	Version(s):	ALL
	Environment:	ALL
	Area:	Analysis Solutions
	Subarea:	Time History Analysis
	Original Author:	Sye Chakraborty Bentley Technical Support Group

Is it possible to view the values of the displacements and forces at each step of a time history analysis?

If you specify the SAVE option against the TYPE command, as in,

DEFINE TIME HISTORY
TYPE 1 FORCE SAVE

STAAD will create text files with the extension .tim and .frc containing those results. Additional information on this is available in the STAAD.Pro Help section Technical Reference of STAAD Commands > TR.31 Definition of Load Systems > TR.31.4 Definition of Time History Load.

After the analysis is completed, you can open those files using a text editor such as NotePad or WordPad. Please note that these files may be very large in size depending on the duration of the dynamic load and the time step value. So, the editor may take some time in opening that file.

To view the diagrams of the history of displacements, go to the Postprocessing workflow. Click on the Layouts and you will see options like Acceleration, Velocity and Displacements which contain facilities for viewing the histories. Click on any node and you will get the time history plot of the right. If you click the right mouse button on those plots, you can view those diagrams in the Frequency domain also. Right click also gives an option to Save Data in a text file.