There's plenty of excellent OpenSees tutorials online. But some other OpenSees tutorials feel like this sardonic, mock programming tutorial. When you watch the video, replace "outdated library" with "OpenSees", "Java" with "Tcl", and "Minecraft" with "incremental dynamic analyses for a portfolio of 3D reinforced concrete frames". https://youtu.be/MAlSjtxy5ak Pretty accurate, right? Let me know in the … Continue reading Every OpenSees Tutorial
Direct Moment-Curvature
That the force-based frame element and fiber sections are in an open relationship should come as no surprise. The displacement-based and mixed frame elements can use fiber sections and all three element formulations can use stress resultant sections. While this post used a coupled stress resultant plasticity model, you can also use the section aggregator … Continue reading Direct Moment-Curvature
Like Spinning Nodes
After posting on reasons that the solution to Ax=b fails, I realized I omitted an important case: truss nodes in a frame model. Although this post might be a stretch for an LBU (least bloggable unit), the blogging equivalent of an LPU, there are important factors to consider for structural models comprised of truss and … Continue reading Like Spinning Nodes
Failure to Solve
Solving a system of simultaneous linear equations, canonically referred to as solving Ax=b in math speak, is at the heart of every equilibrium solution algorithm for nonlinear analysis. In the context of OpenSees, A is the effective tangent stiffness matrix, x is the vector of displacement increments, and b is the residual force vector. However, … Continue reading Failure to Solve
A Blog in Motion
It has been two years since the blog's first post, which was neither interesting nor informative. Since then, the blog has become unstoppable. Not unstoppable in the Michael Jordan in the NBA Playoffs kind of way, but in the sense that momentum makes it difficult to stop posting. Until that time comes, here are summary … Continue reading A Blog in Motion
Non-Fungible OpenSees
The latest spam to creep into the OpenSees universe has come from digital artists looking to sell their NFTs (non-fungible tokens) to members of the OpenSees Facebook group. The art is sold through the NFT marketplace, opensea.io, so I can see the confusion with OpenSees. Before the group admins remove the NFT posts, I ask … Continue reading Non-Fungible OpenSees
RBOC for the Fall
I am teaching graduate level Structural Mechanics at Eastchester for the first time this fall. I will use the Fundamentals of Structural Mechanics book by Keith Hjelmstad. Expect some posts on how to use OpenSees to solve structural mechanics problems for beams, plates, shells, etc. I will do NaBloPoMo again this November. Writing a post … Continue reading RBOC for the Fall
Multiple-Support Excitation
Structural systems typically have different ground accelerations at supports separated by long distances. These systems can be a single structure such as a long span bridge or multiple structures in a region. While most OpenSees analyses use uniform excitation with effective earthquake forces applied to the dynamic DOFs of the model, the framework also accommodates … Continue reading Multiple-Support Excitation
Making Sense Out of Concrete02
Those three extra parameters for Concrete02 are usually enough to make me stick with Concrete01. I struggle to come up with good values for the parameters $latex \lambda$, $latex f_t$, and $latex E_{ts}$ shown in the following image from the OpenSees Concrete02 wiki page. Image developed by Dr. Silvia Mazzoni The four compressive backbone parameters … Continue reading Making Sense Out of Concrete02
Parameter Updates in the Loop
Besides visualization and writing output to files, there's some pretty useful things you can do during an OpenSees analysis. One of those things is updating model parameters. Before getting into parameter updating, it is worth showing that OpenSees analyses can be run one step at a time. Many examples online show a dynamic analysis, e.g., … Continue reading Parameter Updates in the Loop
Portwood Digital 