Thank you for this superb tool that integrates seamlessly with Rhino.
Would it be possible to implement a feature for analysing thin shell structures as well as solids. Also would be nice to be able to assign different materials to different solids/shells.
Finally I attach a model of a concrete structure where the dominant loading comes from its own weight. Therefore the incorporation of gravitational effects will be really useful
Thank you for testing and commenting! Scan&Solve is intrinsically a 3D solver. This means that it will treat shell structures (of finite thickness) as full 3D solids. The advantages of this approach should be obvious: no special cases, no dimensional reduction, no special interfaces, etc. A serious disadvantage is that, depending on how thin the structure is, one may need very high resolution to get a reasonablyt accurate solution. But you can give it a try yourself and see what you think. Also, we expect that the allowable resolution will go up dramatically -- partly because of parallelism and better and cheaper hardware, and partly because of anticipated algorithmic improvements.
Re example: Can you please tell me what the boundary conditions are? How is this structure to be attached or supported? ... or better yet, indicate these restrains in Scan&Solve and save them with the .3dm file. Gravity will be available in the next update of Scan&Solve, but I can test it now. Thanks again!
Do not worry about the wish list items. We really do want to know what the users want. So keep the wish list growing, and hopefully you will see many of them added over time.
On specifying the supports: physically, we cannot apply boundary conditions to the edges or vertices -- only faces with finite area can be restrained or loaded. So right now, your structuredoes not have enough details at the ends to do this. I realize that this may be inconvenient and not what people are used to with FEA ... but it is physical ...
Please have your students post their examples and solutions for all to see!