Hi everyone! I'm helping my teacher of “Structural Analysis I” and “Structural Analysis II” at my university and we are trying to make the students use the Autodesk programs so we have think that maybe they can check/control the results of the class exercises with Robot or Revit. We are talking about really basic stuff like geometric properties of a section and a low level of structural analysis. Things like the one in the image that are very simple, the ABC of structural analysis and later we will also want to make then check more complex structures. The problem is that in the first part of the curse they need to do some calculations without considering material or section of the structure and I don’t know how to do it in Robot or Revit, actually I don’t know if that’s even possible. The image shows a simple beam and a force in the middle, without any calculator we know that the reactions are only vertical but in the opposite direction of the force (F) and both of them are the half of the force (F/2) the point is that when things get more complicated they should check it with Robot and/or Revit but always that I use any of this program for real uses I use a material and a section and now I just don’t know how to consider just this. Does anyone know how to do it? Thanks!
You might check out Autodeksk ForceEffect -- it's an app for iOS and Android that does statics-type calculations.
That said, I hope you're not encouraging a dependence on software for learning and understanding basic engineering calculations. When you're learning, hand calcs are often much more valuable than letting a "black box" do the work for you.
Revit doesn't do any calculations itself. You can get some plugins to do simple calculations.
If you are doing structural analysis, Robot, not Revit, is probably the tool to use.
I suppose using the computer to verify hand calculations is reasonable, as long as the students are showing their work.
However, it may be more trouble than it's worth to try to set up a model in Robot to reproduce a simple beam calculation.
Joe
Have them download the trial version of RISA 3D, and install the the RISA-REVIT analysis link. Then teach them how to export selected portions of the REVIT model to RISA for basic analysis. RISA 3D is so easy to learn and a very common and powerful tool used by many engineering firms. You can select pretty much any beam shape and the first order analysis results will be the same, despite the beam properties. The only error will be from self weight differences, which can be dealt with by not including self weight automatically in a simple analysis, but entering directly as a load.
The reason I suggest RISA over ROBOT, is because it is a more common software, and the trial version fully functional (except for a 40node 40member limit) and free. Also, learning how to go through just these steps alone will give them a great head start and possible advantage over many practicing engineers who are not up to speed on these capabilites.
Another free analysis tool even more basic is MASTAN. but for any analysis tool some simple training is necessary, you should be prepared to present the use of these tools as well.
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