ANALYSIS AND DESIGN INTEGRATED

In the cyclic design process, any changes in the member sizes necessitate re-analysis of the structure in whole or in part. With AMECO-17, this is accomplished very efficiently. First, the analysis is restarted with the joint displacements of the previous structure. Thus only the joints connected to the revised members are subjected to new unbalanced incremental forces. And, secondly, the analysis is extended only to the affected part of the structure. For most loading cases, the forces do not propagate very far from the applied loads.

Thus thousands of loading cases and hundreds of revisions to member sizes can be easily accommodated--almost an impossible task for matrix-based software, where each change in member sizes necessitates resolving the entire global matrix. And for each loading case, the entire inverted matrix must be manipulated. Thus for larger structures, the AMECO-17 structural analysis speed is a few orders of magnitude faster than the speed of matrix-based software. Furthermore, the AMECO-17 second order analysis is executed at practically the same speed as the first order analysis.