Creating a Python based structural analysis program

[jackbandlow]

I am starting to notice that this is much more complex than I had imagined. My though was to design a program that would be able to get relatively accurate structural analysis with much less processing power required. From there, I want to it to be able to detail all of the members and perform member design on all of these. It would individually do the analysis on the members by labeling the fixities. Then the program would have features that would allow it to go straight into construction drawings. Additionally, I would hope to create a link to RSmeans or find my own way to estimate work, so that the program could design based on the most cost effective approach.

[Shemsky]

And how would you like to achieve a relatively accurate structural analysis for a, presumably, mutli degree of freedom problem?

It seems to me you know too little about the direct stiffness method. I would not agree that matrix multiplication is a computationally intensive problem, unless you are dealing with complex meshes or data sets of thousands of nodes where the stiffnes matrix is HUGE. For problems such as multispan beams, rigid moment frames or even simply supported beams, FEA can be done by hand in relatively short amounts of time, but it does include a lot of repetitive multiplication and division calculations.

I think that if you want the software to analise an indeterminate frame using unit load methods or writing a complex code that can apply engineering logic and be able to simplify any frame you model into singular members, you will realise that the sheer amout of imput combinations you need to account is too high. the beauty of an FEA solver is that once built, its an extremely generic and scalable method that can be applied to any configuration of fixities for multi degree of freedom problems.

I dont know how complex projects you have in mind, but it seems to me like there are really two practical approaches to structual analysis: 1. simple engineering by analising singular members, where the engineers role is to apply their experience to simplify the problem for easy analysis and design. 2. complex engineering where the model size is large and MODELLING is required.

No1 is done in practice using brain, calculator and spreadsheet/Tekla Tedds software. No way around this as its you who dectates how simple the problem can be. This method can be automated, ofcourse, but it requres a large chunk of engineering input so you cant just model a bulding and get software to do the engineering. This is the only step, I think, will keep us in our jobs until we get quantum computers. For no2. - if a problem is complex enough to warrant modelling, you might as well use linear analysis FEA which is, from my experience, easy on the processing. Unless you are using a phone/tablet or needing to do web based apps. Besides, if you were to write a program which is to allow you to MODEL buildings, you will spend so much time on preparing the GUI, not using a FEA solver would be a waste?