Beams be assigned a group number to identify them as belonging to a group. Grouping is useful for obtaining the desired roll-up in the mass and interia summary and in the strain energy calculation.
Code 98.0 defines the groups of beams. Code 98.1 defines a label (name) for the group to be printed in the mass properties output section.
The image below shows the GUI facilitating the user inputs for creating the beam groups.
Following are the main sections in this GUI.
- Add... -> adds/creates a group.
- Delete.-> deletes the defined group.
- Close -> exits the GUI
The button "Add..." is clicked to create the beam groups. Below is the image of the GUI, which gets poped-up when the "Add..." button is clicked.
Following are the components in the GUI images shwon above.
The right side listbox (Defined beams) contains the list of defined beams.
The left side of listbox (Picked beams) contains the selections which are made by double-click selecting the beam number inside the "Defined beam" listbox and copying it into the "Picked beam" listbox using "--->" arrow button.
When an item is selected inside the "Picked beams" listbox, it is removed. The right side image shown above shows that Beam1 and Beam2 are selected from first listbox and copied into second listbox. The "Group name" and "Group Id" are the user inputs. The "Group name" input is optional (code 98.1).
Similarly another beam group Grp2 is created as shown below
Following is the image of the main beam-grp GUI after the beam groups are created.
Following is the screen dump taken from the roda input file for beam-grp card.
