MODELLING AND ANALYSING STRUCTURES USING SAP2000

vs. 14.4

A. SHELL ELEMENTS

Area elements must be created on the anti-clockwise direction.

The quadrilateral element is much more accurate than the triangular element.

The aspect ratio (bigger side divided by smaller) should not be too large. Best results
are obtained for aspect ratios near unity, or at least less than four. The aspect ratio
shall not exceed ten.

In general, shell behaviour should be used for area elements instead of pure
membrane or pure plate behaviour, unless the structure is planar and is adequately
restrained.

The membrane thickness specified is used to calculate the selfweight and mass of the
element, as well as the membrane stiffness; whereas the plate thickness is used by the
program to calculate the bending and shear stiffnesses.

 Thickness formulation

The thick-plate formulation (Mindlin/Reissner) includes the effects of shear

deformation and should be used unless the mesh is distorted and shearing
deformations small.

Even for thin-plate bending problems where shearing deformations are truly
negligible, the thick plate formulation tends to be more accurate, although
somewhat stiffer, than the thin-plate. However, the accuracy of the thick-plate
formulation is more sensitive to large aspect ratios and mesh distortions than the
thin-plate formulation.

The thickness formulation has no effect on membrane behaviour, only on plate

behaviour.

 Edge constraints

The program connects all joints that are on the edge of the element to the adjacent
corner joints of the element, when an edge constraint is applied.

Edge constraints can be used to connect together mis-matched area meshes, but
will also connect any element (beams, columns, restrained joints, etc) that has a
joint on the edge of the shell to that shell.

No overall stiffness is added to the model, the effect is entirely local to the edge of
the element.

In general, edge constraints should only be assign to elements in the transition of

meshes, although assigning edge constraints to elements that do not need them
has little effect on performance and no effect on results.

B. JOINT CONNECTIVITY

Shell elements must be created on the anti-clockwise direction

C. MODAL ANALYSIS

Modal analysis is used to determine the vibration modes of a structure. These modes
are useful to understand the behaviour of the structure and to be used in dynamic
analyses.

It has been shown that seismic motions excite only the lower frequencies of the
structure; hence, neglecting the higher frequencies and mode shapes of the system
normally does not introduce errors.

There are two types of modal analysis available on the program:

i. Eigenvector analysis determines the undamped free-vibration mode shapes

and frequencies of the system. These natural modes provide an excellent
insight into the behaviour of the structure;
ii. Ritz-vector analysis seeks to find modes that are excited by a particular
loading. This type of modal analysis can provide a better basis than
eigenvectors when used for response-spectrum analyses that are based on
modal superposition.

Modal analysis is always linear.

A modal load case may be based on the stiffness of the full unstressed structure, or
upon the stiffness at the end of a nonlinear load case.

By using the stiffness at the end of a nonlinear case, the modes under P-delta or
geometric stiffening conditions can be evaluated at different stages of construction, or
following a significant nonlinear excursion in a large earthquake.

 Eigenvector analysis

A restricted frequency range in which to seek the vibration modes can be specified
using the parameters:

i. Shift – the centre of the cyclic frequency range, known as the shift frequency;
ii. Cut – the radius of the cyclic frequency range, known as the cutoff frequency.

0 value for cut means that the program does not restrict the frequency range of the
modes.

When performing a seismic analysis, the lower-frequency modes are usually of most
interest. Therefore is appropriate to use 0 for shift.

The default values for shift and cut are 0 and should be used.

Alternatively, automatic shifting can be requested to speed up the solution and improve
the accuracy of the results. This is particularly helpful when seeking a large number of
modes, for very large structures, or when there are a lot of closely spaced modes to be
found.

Automatic shift is selected by default and should be used with 0 shift and cut.

The pairs eigenvalues-eigenvectors are found by the program using an iteration

algorithm. As the eigenvectors converge they are removed from iteration and new
approximate vectors are introduced.

The default convergence tolerance is 10-9 and should be used.

A static correction mode is the static solution to that portion of the specified load that is
not represented by the found eigenvectors. These modes can be disregarded if
eigenvectors are not used in a response spectrum analysis.

The Eigenvector modal analysis shall be considered on the analysis of the

structure only as a mean to obtain intrinsic insight of the behaviour of the
structure, considering the mass and stiffness distributions.

 Ritz-vector analysis

Dynamic analysis based on a special set of load-dependent Ritz vectors yield more
accurate results than the use of the same number of natural mode shapes. The reason
is that Ritz-vectors are generated by taking into account the spatial distribution of the
dynamic loading, whereas the Eigenvector analysis disregards this important
information.

In general, however, Ritz-vector modes do not represent the intrinsic characteristics of

the structure in the same way the natural modes do.

The first Ritz vector is the static displacement corresponding to the starting load vector.
The remaining vectors are generated from a recurrence relationship in which the mass
matrix is multiplied by the previous obtained Ritz vector and used as the load vector for
the next static solution. Each static solution is called a generation cycle.

When a dynamic load is made up of several independent spatial distributions, each of

these may serve as a starting load vector to generate a set of Ritz vectors.
Each generation cycle creates as many Ritz vectors as there are starting load vectors. If
a generated Ritz vector is redundant or does not excite any mass degrees of
freedom, it is discarded and the corresponding starting load vector is removed from all
subsequent generation cycles.

Each Ritz-vector mode consists of a mode shape and frequency.

For response-spectrum analysis, only the acceleration loads are needed for the starting
vector.

In each generation cycle, Ritz vectors are found in the order in which the starting load
vectors are specified. For this reason, the most important starting load vectors should
be specified first, especially if the number of starting load vectors is not much smaller
than the total number of modes.

The Ritz-vector modal analysis shall be used whenever a response spectrum

analysis is to be used to analyse a structure dynamically.

 Participation ratios

For a unit base acceleration in any direction, the exact base shear must be equal to the
sum of all mass components in that direction. Therefore, the participating mass ratio
is defined as the participating mass of a vibration mode divided by the total mass in that
direction.

The participating mass ratio for a mode provides a measure of how important the mode
is for computing the response to the acceleration loads in each of the three global
directions. If all modes are used the sum of all ratios will be equal to 1.0.

The cumulative sums of the participating mass ratios for all modes up to mode n provide
a simple measure of the adequacy of the number of modes specified.

A static load participation ratio rj can be defined for load condition j as the ratio of the
sum of the work done by a set of truncated modes to the external total work done by the
 load pattern. If this ratio is close to 1.0, the errors introduced by vector truncation will be
very small. However, if this ratio is less than 90 percent, additional vectors should be
used in the analysis to capture the static load response.

A dynamic load participation ratio rj can be defined for load condition j as the ratio of
the sum of the kinetic energy associated with a truncated set of modes to the total
kinetic energy associated with the load pattern.

This ratio measures how well the calculated modes can represent the response to a
given dynamic load and is an extension of the concept of participating mass ratios.

D. RESPONSE SPECTRUM ANALYSIS

Each computed result from a response spectrum analysis is a statistical measure of the
likely maximum magnitude for that response quantity. The actual response can be
expected to vary within a range from this positive value to its negative.

It´s not possible to obtain a correspondence between two different response quantities,
as no information is available as to when this extreme value occurs during the seismic
loading, or as to what the values of other response quantities are at that time.

Ritz vectors are recommended for the modal analysis since they give more accurate
results for the same number of modes.

The function of the response spectrum is assumed by the program to be normalized

with respect to gravity, thus the spectral acceleration values shall be dimensionless.
The program multiplies the spectral acceleration values by the acceleration of gravity (in
the units used on the model) to obtain the acceleration values used in the analysis.

When the response spectrum curve does not cover a range for all the modes, the first
and last pseudo-spectral acceleration values will be extended to smaller and larger
periods (assumed constant), respectively.

 Modal combination

For a given direction of acceleration, the maximum displacements, forces and stresses
are computed throughout the structure for each of the vibration modes. These modal
values for a given response quantity are combined to produce a single positive result for
the given direction of acceleration.

The modal response has two parts for a given direction of the loading: periodic and
rigid. Two frequencies are defined, f1 and f2 (f1<f2), which define the rigid-response
content of the ground motion.

For structural modes with frequencies less than f1 (longer periods), the response is fully
periodic. For structural modes with frequencies above f2 (shorter periods), the response
is fully rigid. Between frequencies f1 and f2, the amount of periodic and rigid response is
interpolated (Gupta 1990). Refer to SAP2000 Reference Analysis Manual for calculating
f1 and f2 values.

Default values assumed by the program are 1 for f1 and 0 for f2, which means no rigid
response is calculated. When 0 is specified for f2 all response is periodic (default
option), regardless of the value specified for f1. For a two parts combined response, the
following condition must be satisfied: 0≤f1≤f2

The SRSS method is recommended by Gupta (default) for combining the periodic and
rigid modal responses.
The periodic modal response should be combined using the CQC method as this
method takes into account the statistical coupling between closely spaced modes
caused by modal damping.

Increasing the modal damping increases the coupling between closely spaced modes. If
the damping is zero for all modes, the CQC method degenerates into the SRSS
method.

 Directional combination

For each displacement, force or stress quantity in the structure, the modal combination
produces a single, positive result for each direction of acceleration. These directional
values for a given response quantity must be combined to produce a single, positive
result.

The SRSS method for direction combination should be used (recommended by EC8).
This method is the default method.

 Output

The base reactions are the total forces and moments about the global origin required of
the supports to resist the inertia forces due to response-spectrum loading.