How to add concrete topping to CLT in S-timber
Answers
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Hello Sara,
Thanks for posting in the Altair Community forums. I am Andrés, from Altair's Technical Support. We'll be happy to respond to your request.
At the moment, this feature is not available in a direct way. However, there might be a chance to work around it, and we will investigate further what can be done. That being said, we could benefit from more details on your intentions. Could you elaborate more on how the CLT and concrete should connect? Is there a particular behavior you wish to represent when modeling this? Any additional details or information you could share with us would be of great help in our investigation, and we appreciate your collaboration.
We will remain attentive to your comments, and we will stay in touch. Feel free to ask any additional questions in the meantime if necessary.
Kind regards,
Andrés Chávez Burgos
AEC Solutions Engineer
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Andres Chavez said:
Hello Sara,
Thanks for posting in the Altair Community forums. I am Andrés, from Altair's Technical Support. We'll be happy to respond to your request.
At the moment, this feature is not available in a direct way. However, there might be a chance to work around it, and we will investigate further what can be done. That being said, we could benefit from more details on your intentions. Could you elaborate more on how the CLT and concrete should connect? Is there a particular behavior you wish to represent when modeling this? Any additional details or information you could share with us would be of great help in our investigation, and we appreciate your collaboration.
We will remain attentive to your comments, and we will stay in touch. Feel free to ask any additional questions in the meantime if necessary.
Kind regards,
Andrés Chávez Burgos
AEC Solutions Engineer
Hello Sara,
We appreciate your patience. We wanted to share the following alternative with you upon further elaboration on the intended behavior you wish to achieve with CLT and concrete.
To have CLT and concrete working together, we can first define two separate panels at different elevations using the Floor Panel tool. For this example, I defined a CLT panel (175 mm thick) and a Concrete panel (50 mm thick only for explanatory purposes) at a 0.2 m elevation from the CLT panel we exaggerated this separation between the panels, but they can come closer together, so long the distance is not less than the model tolerance defined under the Settings menu). I fixed the supports on each corner of the two panels.
Once we have our two panels defined, we can move on to defining connection points between these two panels. We can try two different alternatives at this point. One is to manually create as many joints as you wish on both panels, making sure that they're on the same X. Y coordinates but at a different elevation (each elevation corresponding to the two different panels), or you can also use the generated panels from the automatic meshing algorithm in S-TIMBER and change the joint type from Automatic to User. I tried the latter approach, selected some joints within the two panels in the X and Y direction, and made them User joints through the Define Joints dialog (menu bar, Define -> Joints). For the screenshot below, I made the 97 and 48 joints to User Joints, among some other pairs of joints:
Once you have defined these User joints, we can now apply a Constraint. We can use the Constraint tool and a Lead-Follower constraint type to make sure that the selected joints on one of the panels move together with their paired joint in the other panel. To do so, I can now select the joint on the panel below and the paired joint on the panel above, and select the type of constraint we want to apply (in this case, we assumed you wanted these joints to be constrained to translate simultaneously on each axis) and after the second joint is selected, we can click on Apply to have these pairs of joints constrained, as shown below (you will notice that once the joints are constrained, they will show arrows following the directions we decided to constrain):
To see the results of these constraints, I simply added a Joint load to the mid joint on the concrete panel (the panel above), and after running the analysis, I can see that both the CLT and Concrete panels are displacing uniformly (it might be a little bit difficult to notice due to the dimensions of my panels, but the behavior is in line with our expectations):
As you may have noticed, this procedure involves some manual steps that may be too time-consuming for models with a lot of panels, but we always have the chance to create scripts in S-TIMBER to automate some repetitive tasks.
To prove this, we created a simple script for a separate example, through the Script Editor window. Here, we specified the creation of two panels at different elevations and the creation of connection joints and then we defined a line to create the constraints (and the DoFs to be constrained) between the pair of connection joints defined at 0.5 m intervals, as shown below:
After running the script, we will create a set of connection joints between both panels and these will be automatically constrained as instructed, please refer to the results shown below:
We hope this information is of help. Please let us know if you'd like us to elaborate further on any of the procedures described above, or if you need additional assistance.
Kind regards,
Andrés Chávez Burgos
AEC Solutions Engineer
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