Connection With SAP2000 and Orthotropic Materials

Hello All,

I am new to Geometry Gym and honestly not too familiar with how it works. I was searching around online and can't seem to find any kind of tutorial on its use in conjunction with SAP. I'm analyzing small frame structures, so if anyone could link me to or even create a small tutorial that might help, that'd be great. I just need to know the general process of going from a small model of lines to a structure to be analyzed with SAP.

Additionally, due to the small nature of what I work with, my primary building material thus far has been wood, and I can't seem to find a way to implement orthotropic materials. Can anyone shed light on this? I know how to do it within SAP itself but it seems like you create the materials within Grasshopper before the output? Is this correct?

Matt

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Matthew Horner on September 9, 2013 at 12:02pm

I've attached the Rhino file I've been trying to mess with, but it's pretty much the same as the other one I sent you with some joints added in. Either way though, recomputing fixed the problem, even if I had started Grasshopper first. I had never done that before and didn't even know it existed honestly. But at least that's solved.

As far as the previews go, the bull ant profile creators are what display perfectly when plugged into the Sapcreatesectionproperty components. The preview issue was happening when I was using regular grasshopper components like edge surface and the like. Not sure if this is typical...maybe a polyline would display correctly and the scaling issue was related to the fact that a surface was plugged in?

Finally, before I read your latest reply I actually had tried the thickness thing already. What it did was it imported to SAP normally and when I viewed the section within SAP, it appeared to look like a solid rectangle, but was of course created as a box section with large flange and web thicknesses, but it was at least valid. It would remain to be seen whether or not this section would behave like a rectangle drawn in the section editor would or not. Obviously, if there was a way to get that, it would be preferable, but again, if worse comes to worst, I could draw the rectangular section I need within SAP itself, that takes little time.

Thanks again! Let me know if there's anything else I can do and/or what you think about the rectangles.

Matt

Attachments:

Initial Rhino File.3dm, 112 KB

Permalink Reply by Jon Mirtschin on September 9, 2013 at 2:14pm

I'll check the scaling of geometry sections when I get a chance. As noted previously, standard shapes are the way to go with SAP so please use this for the time being. It's possible I can (or have) developed code to convert a polyline back to a rectangle. Can you reply with why a shape is preferable to a standard parameterized shape?

Permalink Reply by Matthew Horner on September 9, 2013 at 2:18pm

Of course. It somewhat relates to my desire for orthotropic materials. Basically, these structures right now are relatively small in scale, and built out of wood. So I just want to most accurately model the cross-section of, in this particular case, 1x8 and 2x8 lumber in SAP.

Permalink Reply by Jon Mirtschin on September 9, 2013 at 2:20pm

I see, well if you can use a naming convention, and update the sections in some automatic way, I think that is the best option for the time being. I will try to test this further from Grasshopper but not seen anything in the API yet.

Permalink Reply by Matthew Horner on September 10, 2013 at 8:08am

Sounds like a plan to me! And of course let me know if the orthotropic material component works out. Thanks for everything so far!

Permalink Reply by Matthew Horner on September 9, 2013 at 12:49pm

Additionally, is there a way to remove the "ggGHfrm" tag from the frame element labels when baked into SAP? I relabeled them using the ggSAPFrameAtts component of yours and plugged that into the create frame, and those labels show up, but have ggGHfrm attached to each

Permalink Reply by Jon Mirtschin on September 9, 2013 at 2:17pm

Yes, this has been requested before. Just note this tag is the only way I can subsequently update the model and replace or delete superseded items. So if the number of items reduces or names change, you might end up with redundant items.

You can disable the tag, refer the attached image for right clicking the ggBake button.

Permalink Reply by GiogioTn on November 19, 2013 at 4:25am

Hi all,

I am a student from Italy and I'm approaching ggSAP Importer trying to analyze some structures (extremely easy at the moment) generated in Grasshopper with SAP2000.

This topic was extremely useful to me seeing that I actually used it as a tutorial, I really thank you!

Can I ask how is the progress with the orthotropic materials implementation because I should work with wood materials too, I know I can define and assign the material on SAP itself but it would be extremely useful to me because I would like to work with Galapagos too and I'm trying to avoid any "SAP intervention" at least at these early stages.

Let me apologize for my extreme ignorance about this topic and for my bad english, it's quite hard to explain stuff like this!

Permalink Reply by Jon Mirtschin on November 19, 2013 at 11:29am

Hi Giorgio,

I did implement in an orthotropic material component in recent builds of the SAP plugin, although I was getting a crash in SAP2000 when I first tested it. The component is still hidden at this point in time.

If you test the attached, let me know if it works for you. You can cut and paste the component into other definitions. If it works, I'll make it visible for the next build.

Cheers,

Jon

Attachments:

131119 ortho material.gh, 9 KB

Permalink Reply by GiogioTn on November 19, 2013 at 3:58pm

Hi Jon!

Thank you so much that will help a lot!

I tested it and it definitely seems to work! Amazing as the plugin!

Thanks for everything!

Permalink Reply by Rok Soklic on February 9, 2014 at 4:49am

Hi,

im having problems with the ggSAPSolver function. Not really sure if i connected the inputs/outputs the way they should be? I've attached the simplest example i could think of, and would be grateful if you could help in some way. I presume the results output should appear (for example node displacement,element forces etc.) however all i get is the ->

"1. Error in conducting analysis or extracting result. If you have closed SAP application, please restart Rhino/Grasshoper and retry. Else please contact Jon for assistance Unable to cast COM object of type 'SAP2000v16.cAnalysisResultsSetupClass' to interface type 'SAP2000v16._cAnalysisResultsSetup'. This operation failed because the QueryInterface call on the COM component for the interface with IID '{89C1F232-D552-43CE-BE6C-68A7D622E293}' failed due to the following error: No such interface supported (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80004002 (E_NOINTERFACE)).

Rhino/SAP reports that the analysis was succesful and if i manually start the analysis (with minor adjustments to load cases) in Sap i get the results - they are simply not exported back to GH?).

I'm using Rhino5,SAP V16

Hope this posts makes sense.

Rok

Attachments:

Console.gh, 17 KB

Permalink Reply by Jon Mirtschin on February 9, 2014 at 5:17am

Hi Rok,

Thanks for posting. I don't think you're doing anything wrong, I opened your model and got results (refer image). I would recommend flattening the data on the queries (I've changed my code so this automatically happens from next build).

Can you try to update the plugin from http://www.geometrygym.com/downloads (as I suspect your running the plugin prior to last). If this still doesn't fix, perhaps contact me on email and I'll send you a diagnostic build of the plugin to check why it might be working on my computer and not yours.

Cheers,

Jon