STAAD.Pro Ideas Portal
Welcome to the STAAD.Pro Ideas portal. The purpose of this site is to post ideas for enhancements and new features. We value your feedback and our team regularly reviews your suggestions for consideration in future releases.
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Many thanks for logging this idea. I think it could be really part of a bigger idea, that of providing a clearer description of supports in the Supports dialog rather than just support 1,2 etc. The challenge with multi-linear springs is that they are in fact unusual in that they are a modifier on a previous spring support definition which can be confusing. Perhaps the answer is to develop a new Support multilinear spring definition block which must be defined as the first set of commands after SUPPORT, then a new support type called spring which has the format of:-
(node list) SPRING KX KY KZ MX MY MZ
where
the spring definitions can either be a value (0 free, or -1 fixed) or a reference to one of the multilinear springs something like:-
SUPPORT
DEFINITION MULTILINEAR SPRING
S1 (displacement/stiffness pairs)
S2 (displacement/stiffness pairs)
S3 (displacement/stiffness pairs)
END DEFINITION
* supports in the current format
1 TO 10 FIXED
11 TO 20 PINNED
21 TO 30 FIXED BUT KFY 10000
* now new multilinear supports with spring S1 applied in Y direction, free in X and Z and fixed in MX, MY and MZ
31 TO 100 SPRING 0 S1 -1 -1 -1
In this way a multilnear support is easier to identify and can be a single command in the GUI.