Integration member

Did you ever meet the requirement to design shear walls? Or have you created a shell model of a bridge and you need to change it to 1D model due to the other calculations? We have solution for you in newly released version of SCIA Engineer 19. We have developed functionality called Integration member which can help you with this. Integration member integrates all internal forces from 2D as well as 1D members which are in the defined bounding box around the member. This results in internal forces of 1D element. You may assume that it would be pretty difficult to define and use this integration member. That's not true. You just need to define the axis of the member, type and size of the bounding box and press the button. You don't need to define any master slab as in the past because the integration member is an independent entity and does not influence the rest of the model nor the analysis part. The whole calculation is done on the background once you ask SCIA Engineer to give you internal forces for any load case, combination, result class. The integration member works for linear as well as non-linear analysis.

We have developed functionality called Integration member in SCIA Engineer 19.0 to enable spatial integration of 1D and 2D member stresses and showing resulting representation of internal forces just as if they were on a single beam. In SCIA Engineer 19.1 we provide improvements of this feature that extends its usability in multiple ways. First, In order to enable both short and long integration members in the project we enabled setting the amount of sections as direct property of the integration member. Second improvement is that you may choose to integrate the internal forces with respect to the centroid of all integrated elements, which is very usable in the case of non-constant section. Additionally, it is possible to exclude custom selection of members from the integration. You may change all of the above in the properties of each integration member without the necessity to recalculate the model - all is part of the post-processing of results. The definition of an integration member and integrated internal forces may be exported by XML document.

Customizing number of section can not be easier, just change the property of any integration member and refresh results. This improvement enables having in the project some rather short integration members and also possible very long ones while keeping the same level of detail.

As integration member is a tool for integrating spatial structure from set of beams and 2D elements, it may be beneficial to integrate the internal forces with the respect of the centroid of the structure. A choice is available to integrate the internal forces in respect to centroid or in respect to the definition line of the integration member.

First introduced in version 19.0