IES VisualPlate User's Guide
Training Videos
VisualPlate is a powerful analysis tool that accurately solves plate bending problems using finite elements. The program’s easy-to-use interface and versatility allows you to quickly model plate systems made of any material that are loaded out-of-plane.
The layout of VisualPlate is designed to maximize productivity and make it easy to create models, apply loads, view results, and create reports.
In VisualPlate, standard circular, rectangular, and polygon boundaries be created, or custom arbitrary boundaries can be drawn. Boundaries can be modified or designated to be a hole. When boundaries overlap each other the thickness of the overlapping part can be designated.
In VisualPlate, point supports, line supports, and line stiffeners can be used to support the plates out of plane. The properties of the supports can be set to standard values such as fixed, free, pinned, etc. or the stiffness of the supports can be specified.
Point loads as well as uniform and linearly varying pressures can be applied in VisualPlate. Apply service level loads and choose from standard Load Combinations or create your own Custom Load Combinations.
For the finite element plates, the displacements, moments, shears, bending stresses, and Von Mises stresses can be displayed graphically in VisualPlate. Also, the displacements, moments, shears, torsion, and bending stresses can be view for the line stiffeners.
Reports are easily created and modified in VisualPlate. Either create a complete project report or create custom report by adding and removing the tables and graphics as needed.
The script feature in VisualPlate is a powerful tool that uses a command line interface to create model objects, generate service cases, apply loads, extract results, generate reports, and more. The basics of using the command line are discussed in this video.
In addition to using the command line directly, more complex scripts can be generated in any text file in the C# Programming Language and read into VisualPlate. This allows models to be easily generated, parametric studies to be performed, finite element meshes to be automatically refined, and much more as discussed in this video.
Several new features have been added to VisualPlate Version 6.0 which are discussed in this video.
A variety of new features have been added to VisualPlate 7 including a command line, the ability to import external scripts, location results, and report improvements as discussed in this video.