RISA Technologies, LLC - Physical Member


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	PLAY (For Broadband)

	DOWNLOAD (For Dial-up) Self-Extracting ZIP file, (589 Kb)
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Physical Member - Unique Feature

Physical Members provide fixity to all joints that occur along the length of the member, without breaking that member into multiple smaller members. You may use the physical member feature to avoid defining one field member with multiple members in your model. This saves time in building and editing your model and understanding your results.

To understand the benefits of Physical Members see the trusses in the following figure. The first truss shows the chords modeled without physical members and thus with multiple members modeling each chord. The second truss models each chord with one Physical Member. Both models will yield the same results. However the Physical Member model is more intuitive and easier to work with because you don’t have to work with multiple members when you create the chords, load them, edit them or evaluate their results. Notice that the distributed load may be defined for one Physical Member from start to end. In the other model the distributed load end magnitudes have to be calculated for each of five members in order for the entire load to be defined.

Continuous beams, multi-story columns and truss chords are examples of continuous field members that can be modeled with one Physical Member. You may define them from start to finish without having to explicitly define their connection to other elements or boundaries through intermediate joints. Subsequently when it comes time to make changes to a member you can edit the properties of one Physical Member rather than the multiple members that might otherwise represent it.

Physical Members are also effective in managing results because the results for one Physical Member are reported together in the results spreadsheets and the member detail report. With the truss example above the Physical Member model allows you to look at results for one member making it easier to track maximum forces and other values.

Play the Physical Member Movie File
(Broadband Only - Requires Windows Media Player)

Download the Physical Member Movie File
(Recommended for Dial Up Connections)
Physmems.exe is a Self Extracting ZIP file, size is 589 Kbytes. This is a Windows Media Player movie showing examples of physical members in RISA-3D. You'll need the Windows Media Player to view the movie. See below for links to download this program if you don't already have it. You'll have to execute the downloaded file to unzip the movie file (physmems.wmv) before playing it.

To obtain the Windows Media Player 7.1
Total Size: 10,187 KB Download Time: 53 min @ 28.8k
Go to the following site: http://windowsmedia.com/download/download.asp

For a faster download time you may obtain version 6.4 instead by going to the following page:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/en/download/default.asp
Choose (from the first list): Player 6.4 for Windows 95 and NT4
Total Size: 3,611 KB Download Time: 18 min @ 28.8k