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When you start learning new software, the first thing is to get fully accustomed to its graphical user interface (GUI). The GUI is a point of interaction between a user and software. A complete understanding of the GUI means that the user takes the full advantage of the software's features.
In this session, we introduced the features and the basic skills of using midas Civil's GUI. By becoming familiar with midas Civil interface, the user will confidently build a model and perform numerical analysis.
This course will be effective for the engineers who has just started with midas Civil.
To select/unselect particular elements easily and quickly, midas Civil provides various type of functions. If we need help about each function, we can go to the online manual (by pressing F1) which provides all of explanation.
After selecting some elements, we can use 'Active' command to display only selected elements on the screen. Getting back to the original state by active all, after selecting three elements, if you click ‘inactivate’, those elements will disappear and we can see remaining elements.
When only activated elements are there, you can inverse activation so that hidden elements would be shown exchanging with activated elements. After all works is done, all elements can appear again by ‘active all’. These sort of works have nothing to do with analysis result, but make us to be convenient to edit model.
‘Hidden’ means that you can set whether or not to show the section and thickness of elements. Taking simple beam as an example, the beam is modeled as a 1-D beam element.
That is, this beam is modeled by combining 1-D line and section data. If we switch on ‘hidden’ , the element originally seen as a line became a three-dimensional shape including a section data.
However, in the case of the plate, the thickness may not appear even if we switch one the hidden icon. For example, as shown in following bridge, the circular section of the column is now properly visible, but the plate thickness of the superstructure is not visible even though we switch on hidden option. What should we do in this case?
Let’s go into the draw tab and select hidden option, then there is a checking button ; plane thickness. After checking on plane thickness, and hit OK. So the plate thickness is visible for us now.
In midas Civil, there is a tree menu on the left side. We can see all of the work we have done in modeling such as Loads, Properties, boundary conditions, and so on. It allows us to select some items and attribute them to model.
After selecting some elements in the model, we can easily assign the property to selected elements by Drag&Drop
For example, once you select the elements of A36 which are truss elements, and Drag&Drop A572 from tree menu onto the screen. As a results, the color of A36 has turned blue because it has not been assigned to any elements, and now truss elements belong to A572.
In case of boundary conditions, once you display, hexagon symbols appear on the supports. This means that Dx, Dy, Dz, Rx, Ry and Rz in clockwise direction, and green when fixed.
In the upper left of the screen, there are some icons of construction stage. In the left icon, we can define the construction stage, and in the middle, we can see the model corresponding to each construction stage. In the right icon, we can define composite sections for each construction stage.
On the lower left of treemenu, we can see the list of construction stages we have defined. Currently, construction stages from CS1 to CS16 are defined. The model we are looking at is selected as base because this is a base model, in other words, completed model including all the work.
To see relevant model for each stage, return to the screen and click the base and select cs1. In the works tab of the tree menu, only the items corresponding to CS1 are activated.
Depending on our selection, the screen shows the corresponding model and the tree menu items will be changed according to model.