Exporting Interaction Surfaces to Excel

[emilio.bolanos]

Dear All,

I have recently updated ASBD to the 2019 version and am currently looking into the use of "Interaction surface" utility in section designer.

I can see that that the interaction surface can be exported to Excel, but was wondering whether the 3D surface graph could be replicated in there? The idea is that I could then verify section utilisations against the design effects from multiple load combinations outside of ASBD.

Many thanks in advance,

Emilio

[dave_geeves]

Hi Emilio,

You can export the DZ influence coefficients of an influence surface using the results viewer when viewing the influence surface results.  This is most easily achieved by right clicking in the table and copying to clipboard.  This can then be pasted into a spreadsheet.

This will not include the X Y coordinates of the joints but these can also be easily copied and pasted from the "Joint Detail" tables in the structure definition.

The x,y,z data is then available in the spreadsheet but I'm not an expert in excel so I don't know how to easily display this as a surface.  I believe it is possible by arranging the data into a mesh format and then interpolating empty cell values - but this seems hard work.

If you know how to do this in excel I would be very pleased if you could share the process as I've often wondered if this was possible.

I hope this helps

Kind regards

Dave Geeves

[simon_hooper · Accepted solution]

Hi Emilo

I see you are refering to Interaction surface and not Influence surface 😉

It isn't possible AFAIK to produce the surface in Excel with the Mx, My, Axial data.  This video explains the problem https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28MYjylKvwI.

It is probably simplier to import the load combinations into ASBD and do the verification within the interaction surface feature.  If you click on the "Loadcases" node in the Design Sections tree, there is an option to paste from clipboard data.  If you do a copy with existing loadcases first, you will see the format that is required for the paste.

Simon

[dave_geeves]

Hi,

My apologies for misreading the question - I should visit the opticians.  Thanks Simon for pointing this out and giving the appropriate answer.

Kind regards

Dave Geeves

[emilio.bolanos]

Dave, Simon,

Thanks very much for your responses. That certainly was slightly confusing! But got there in the end...

As you point out, Simon, Excel is probably not the best environment to recreate the interaction surface, as it hasn't got that built-in capability.

With regard to pasting from clipboard data, I'll have to give it a try, but a priori it seems that it will be tricky to paste hundreds of rows of coexisting design effects... I've read a bit more about the topic at it looks like handling the interaction surface data may be relatively easy in other software packages, such as Matlab or R-Studio, the latter being open source.

I'll try to expand on this further if I ever get the time to carry on researching!

Thanks again and regards,

Emilio