SpaceClaim Online Help

Beam properties

Select a beam in the Beams folder and you can change the following properties, which are found in the Beam section of the Properties panelArea of the user interface that displays editable details about the selected object(s). This panel is initially displayed on the lower left side of the screen, but can be moved.:

• ProfileLineA straight line, arc, or spline drawn in Sketch mode or on a layout plane. Lines have length but no area. When you pull a sketch into 3D with the PullTool used to distort or deform geometry. Use the Pull tool to offset, extrude, revolve, sweep, draft, and blend faces; or to round, chamfer, or extrude edges. When converting a sketch to 3D, pulling a line creates a surface and pulling a surface creates a solid. tool, lines become edges. in space; outline of an object; used to describe objects when sweeping or blending. Name
• Orientation: The angle of the profile relative to the path.
• Reversed: Changing this property flips the profile.
• SectionDesign2D or 3D model that contains at least one top-level component. mode in which you edit solids by working with their edges and vertices in cross-section. ViewOrientation settings that you can apply to your design, including spin, pan, and zoom. You can adjust these settings individually or you can apply one of the following preconfigured views: Trimetric, Isometric, Top, Bottom, Front, Back, Right, Left. You can also select Snap View and click a face to view it head-on. is cut away to show interior detail. Anchor: Select the location where the profile intersects with the path of the beam: Area Centroid, Shear Center, or Location. If you select Location, then you can enter the X and Y coordinates of the anchor location. Area Centroid is the default.
• Location: Correspond with the orientation arrows in the beam Orient tool.

To rename a beam in the Structure treeDisplay in the Structure panel that shows you each of the objects in your design. You can expand or collapse the nodes of the tree to view the objects. You can rename objects, create, modify, replace, and delete objects, as well as work with components., right-click and select Rename.

You can edit the Beam Section properties by highlighting values and changing them accordingly. This allows you to create beams that have different geometry characteristics from their profile sketches.

Beams can also have material properties just like other objects.

See Changing beam profiles for information about beam profile properties.

Formulas used for Beam Section properties

The following beam cross-section properties are calculated by SpaceClaim and transferred to ANSYS.

The area of section:

The X coordinate of the centroid:

The Y coordinate of the centroid:

Moment of inertia about the X axis:

Moment of inertia about the Y axis:

Product of inertia:

The warping constant, shear center and torsional constants are calculated from the warping function. The warping function is the solution to the St. Venant boundary value problem for pure torsion:

Using the Trefftz definition, the shear center and warping constant are calculated purely as a property of the section:

X coordinate of shear center:

Y coordinate of shear center:

Warping constant:

with