Development of General Purpose Offshore Structural Analysis Programme. Part 1: Pre- and Post-Processing of Data Using SAP IV

摘要

The SAP-IV, current version of SAP, a Structural Analysis Program for static and dynamic response of linear systems, has been a very powerful and versatile analysis tool for a wide variety of structural systems. There are areas of improvement in SAP-IV to make it more versatile. Since SAP-IV requires large amounts of input data from cards, use of automatic data generators could minimize data input. Also efficient pre-processors, having facilities to produce automatic computer plots of meshes of structure to weed-out input data errors so that several abortive computer runs can be avoided before the problem is successfully solved, and post-processors, having facilities to produce automatic plots of output of results to check quickly any anomalies present in the results so that much of user's time can be saved in interpreting large amounts of printed output (especially for large and computer structural systems), could be incorporated into SAP-IV. The authors have developed computer programs viz., MESHPLOT, a pre-mesh plotting program to produce plots of finite element meshes, and DEMESHPL a post-mesh plotting program to produce plots of two- and three-dimensional structural systems by viewing the structure from any desired angle. The types of elements available for plotting are those in SAP-IV. These programs can be either incorporated into SAP-IV to run on-line or run off-line with SAP-IV. These programs have been implemented on IBM 370/155 computer system at I.I.T., Madras and described in this report.