Creating Beam Properties

A beam property is a physical property assigned to a section of a part. You can also associate a local beam property to a piece of the geometry.
To know more about this property, see Beam Property in the Finite Element Reference Guide.

This task shows you how to:

	add beam physical properties to a shape design by selecting a meshed wireframe geometry
	create local beam properties (on the condition a beam property was previously applied to the geometry)

Open the sample52.CATAnalysis document from the sample directory.

	Make sure a material was applied to the geometry and a 1D mesh was assigned to the beam (it is already done in this particular case).
	You cannot apply beam properties and 1D mesh parts on geometry included in a sketch.

Add Beam Physical Properties

You can add beam physical properties to a shape design by selecting a meshed wireframe geometry

1. Click the Beam Property icon .
The Beam Property dialog box appears.

	`Name`: you can modify the name of the property
	`Supports`: you can select a support.
	`Section`: you can choose the type of section (and symbol) and define the parameters.

Cylindrical:

Radius: R

Tubular:

	`Outside Radius`: Ro
	`Inside Radius`: Ri

Rectangular:

	`Length (Y)`: L
	`Height (Z)`: H

Thin Box Beam:

	`Exterior Length (Y)`: Le
	`Exterior Height (Z)`: He
	`Interior Length (Y)`: Li
	`Interior Height (Z)`: Hi

Thin U-Beam:

	`Global Length (Y)`: L
	`Global Height (Z)`: H
	`Global Thickness`: T

Thin I-Beam:

	`Global Length (Y)`: L
	`Associated Thickness`: Tl
	`Global Height (Z)`: H
	`Associated Thickness`: Th

Thin T-Beam:

	`Global Length (Y)`: L
	`Associated Thickness`: Tl
	`Global Height (Z)`: H
	`Associated Thickness`: Th

Thin X-Beam:

	`Global Length (Y)`: L
	`Associated Thickness`: Tl
	`Global Height (Z)`: H
	`Associated Thickness`: Th

User-Defined:

	`Cross-sectional Area`
	`Ixx`
	`Iyy`
	`Izz`
	`Shear center (Y)`
	`Shear center (Z)`
	`Shear Factor (XY)`
	`Shear Factor (XZ)`

Any section

If you select a geometry option, all the data of the user-defined beam are computed.

Orientation Point: the orientation point gives the orientation of the Y direction for any wire frame at any point: X is fixed tangent to the wire frame and in the direction of the oriented wire frame. After computation is performed, to visualize particular axis on each element, right-click on the property set and select the Generate Image called Local axis symbol (see further below for more details).

Be careful: avoid creating an orientation point that is tangent to the line or the curve. If so, you may have some problems when computing the case.

2. Select the support geometry to be applied a Beam property.

The Beam Property dialog box is updated as shown here:

3. Select Rectangular as Section option.

Symbols appear on the geometry to simulate the section of the beam.

4. Click the Definition button in the Beam Property dialog box to define dimensions. The Beam Definition dialog box appears.

5. Enter 5 mm in the Length (Y) field and 10 mm in the Height (Z) field.

6. Click OK in the Beam Definition dialog box.

7. Select a point as Orientation Point.

The Beam Property dialog box appears as shown here:

8. Click OK in the Beam Property dialog box.
The Beam Property is added. In this case, Beam Prorperty.1 feature appears in the specification tree.

Create Local Beam Property

You can associate a local section to a piece of the geometry.

1. Right-click the Beam Property.1 feature previously created in the specification tree and select the Create Local Beam Property option from the contextual menu.
The Local Beam Property dialog box appears.

Name: you can modify the name of the property

Supports: you can select a support.

Section: you can choose the type of section (and symbol) and define the parameters.

Orientation Point: the orientation point gives the orientation of the Y direction for any wire frame at any point: X is fixed tangent to the wire frame and in the direction of the oriented wire frame. After computation is performed, to visualize particular axis on each element, right-click on the property set and select the Generate Image called Local axis symbol (see further below for more details).

2. Select the part of the geometry on which you want to apply a local Beam property.

The Local Beam Property is updated as shown here:

3. Change the Section type. In this particular case, select the Thin Box Beam option.
The geometry appears as shown here.

4. Click the Definition button in the Local Beam Property dialog box to define the dimensions of the section.
The Beam Definition dialog box appears.

5. Enter the following values in the different fields of the Beam Definition dialog box.

6. Click OK in the Beam Definition dialog box.

7. Select a point as Orientation Point.

8. Click OK in the Local Beam Property dialog box.
A Local Beam Property.1 feature appears in the specification tree.

Products Available in Analysis Workbench

The ELFINI Structural Analysis product offers the following additional feature with a right mouse click (key 3):

on a Loads objects set:

Generate Image: generates an image of the computed Mesh Property objects. The image can be edited to include part or all of the options available.

Right-click on a Properties objects set and select the Generate Image option. The Image Choice dialog box is displayed. You can select images by clicking them in the list.

You will find below an example of all the options that can be available in the Image choice dialog box, depending on the interactions previously performed

The resulting images sequence is obtained by superposition.

Report: the partial status and results of intermediate . pre-processor computations are reported in HTML format. It represents a subset of the global Report capability and generates a partial report of the Mesh Property objects set Computation.

Click the Basic Analysis Report icon on the bottom toolbar. The .html partial report file is displayed.

Note that you can manually edit or delete Beam properties.