Gimme All Your Modal Damping

The GimmeMCK integrator is one of my more useful contributions to OpenSees. This integrator allows you to extract the individual mass, damping, and stiffness matrices, or some linear combination therein, in order to see what's assembled in an OpenSees model or to bootstrap new functionality. While getting the mass and stiffness matrices seems to work, … Continue reading Gimme All Your Modal Damping →

Non-Convergence Is Not Structural Collapse

Legend has it that some published research results based on nonlinear dynamic analysis--incremental dynamic analyses, seismic fragility curves, Monte Carlo simulations, etc.--considered a non-convergent OpenSees model to indicate structural collapse or failure. Let's think about this for a minute. Here is the displacement response in two orthogonal directions at the top of a nearly 50 … Continue reading Non-Convergence Is Not Structural Collapse →

More Than You or Eigen Chew

Software does exactly what you tell it to do. But problems arise when you don't know--or assume you know--what instructions you're giving. For example, many people like to use the 'fullGenLapack' eigenvalue solver in OpenSees because it will compute all N eigenpairs (eigenvalue with corresponding eigenvector) for a model whereas the default eigenvalue solver will … Continue reading More Than You or Eigen Chew →

Something, Something, Something Fiber

Two recent inquires asked why model response using frame elements with elastic fiber sections, i.e., sections with fibers whose stress-strain response is $latex \sigma=E\varepsilon$, differs from the response with elastic elements, i.e., defined by E, A, Iz, and Iy, either with elasticBeamColumn elements or nonlinear elements with elastic sections. I've touched on this subject a … Continue reading Something, Something, Something Fiber →

OpenSees Scattergories

This is the blog's 200th post, which I will celebrate by not writing something technical. Instead, I will let you know that I organized the other 199 posts into the following Categories: Community - how to be a good OpenSees citizen; modeling challengesConstitutive Models - material, fiber, and section modelsElement Formulations - frame and solid … Continue reading OpenSees Scattergories →

Two Fibers Explain So Much

In a previous post, I asked how well we can capture the moment-curvature response of a rectangular section with EPP material using different integration methods with two fibers. For flexural response, two is the minimum number of fibers necessary to satisfy section equilibrium--one fiber for tension, the other fiber for compression. The previous post showed … Continue reading Two Fibers Explain So Much →

Much Ado About Damping

I do not remember why I was searching the internet for "damping" a couple weeks ago, but I came across this document on constructing a Rayleigh damping matrix, $latex {\bf C}=\alpha {\bf M}+\beta {\bf K}$. But instead of taking the usual approach of specifying damping ratios for exactly two frequencies of vibration, the document describes … Continue reading Much Ado About Damping →