IES VisualAnalysis User's Guide
The Design Process
This topic is a 30,000 foot look at "how" you do design in VisualAnalysis. It assumes you familiar with the essential design concepts. The outline is the same whether you are designing with members or a plate mesh (concrete slab), the terminology changes from 'Group' to 'Mesh' for slab design.
Prerequisites: Setup Load Combinations and get "reasonable" Analysis Results!
The first step in the actual design process is getting a Design View. This window looks much like a Model View, but has a Filter, context menu, and design legend that will help you work with design groups.
VisualAnalysis will normally automatically create design groups according to how the members are oriented in the model view, based on the setting in the Project Settings section in Project Manager. You may wish to take charge of this with manual groups. Once groups are defined to your liking you need to enter appropriate design parameters for each group (bracing, deflections, size constraints, etc.). Use the tab after selecting one or more members or groups.
If you set up design parameters when there are no analysis results, the unity checks will not recalculate with every change. This can be far more efficient!
Unity check results are calculated and displayed automatically in the Design View if analysis results are available when you switch to this view type. Unity checks may have a prefix (~ = approximate), or a suffix (! = warning; !! = error) see the Help Pane or design report to understand warnings or errors.
In a Design View, double-click on a member or plate to see a design report.
Alternately include a Design Member Results item into any other report.
To search for optimal member shapes or slab details, you may select any one or more elements in a group and choose command. The software will search for a least-weight design and present you with some options. Available options may be limited by size constraints in the parameters. You may experiment with different shape profiles, or parametric sizes to really optimize the member for the demands.
Your design member shapes are approximate! That is, your analysis-model has not changed and the member forces used were based on analysis using different member stiffnesses! Note that optimization is per-member, not per-model. As you change members, the demands on members may shift around your model due to relative stiffnesses. This may cause other previously designed members to fail again! VisualAnalysis does not currently offer a structure-wide optimization.
Changes are not official until you use the command. This is available so you can work through all of your design groups without losing the analysis results due to design changes.
To verify that your design selections really do satisfy all the requirements you will need to synchronize the changes or rerun the analysis.
Whenever you change the relative stiffness of elements in your model, you may also change the moment distribution. Thus, unity checks are made using forces calculated on a different model and are flagged as approximate. A tilde (~) in front of unity checks to indicates the checks are approximate, based on results from a previous version of the model.
After you synchronize and reanalyze the model, the design groups are rechecked. If all the members in the group are the same shape, and all the members have unity checks less than one, then the group is considered as having a good design.
The window and offer a number of ways to view the design check results. If you want to really understand the unity-check value displayed, simply double-click on a member in the .