circular areas

[packy]

1.How can I draw a circular area?
2.Can I define a point at the intersection of a frame with the grid? Thank you!

 

[IJR]

Packy

Do you mean a circular plate using shell element?

There are several ways to do this

1)Use the SAP2000 plate template. It is great, but you need to play with it a bit. It is there under Cylinders and plates option, once you try to make a new model.

2). You can draw the circle in Autocad, prefferably with lines in it. Then import the drawing(dxf) into SAP2000. That will get you a number of lines and points for you to use to approximate a circle. I personally prefer use this method

3)You can calculate the coordinates of all points you need, and use excel to input them into SAP2000. This is great, but you will need to learn more on how this is done

4)Since a cirle is symmetric, you can just enter a few points manually on the screen directly, using special joints. Then duplicate this radially. This method can be very fast.I use this sometimes.

hope this helps

IJR