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Trapezoidal Beam Loads

Original Post - 05 May 2021 - Michael H. Scott

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OpenSees will never win any awards for documentation. Although many features, e.g., Concrete23, are not documented because no one uses them, a few useful items lack documentation.

For instance, did you know that you can apply trapezoidal member loads to beam elements?

You can do so with additional arguments to the eleLoad command with the beamUniform type.

ops.eleLoad('-ele',eleTag,'-type','beamUniform',wya,wxa,aOverL,bOverL,wyb,wxb)

The loads–force/length, transverse and axial–are input with respect to local element axes. The starting and stopping points, a/L and b/L, are normalized with respect to the element length, so the valid range for these points is 0 to 1.

Currently, this element load option only works with the 2D versions of elasticBeamColumn and forceBeamColumn. There’s an implementation for the 3D elasticBeamColumn, but I think it is triangular, not trapezoidal. No problem, just use two element loads–one uniform, one triangular–to get a trapezoid.

Esta pregunta se hizo durante OpenSees Cafecito.