Generation of Design Elements for shear walls¶
Important
This workflow requires SOFiSTiK Analysis + Design with Interface to SOFiSTiK FEA
Title: SOFiSTiK Analysis + Design: Generation of Design Elements for shear walls | Quality: 1080p HD | Captions: English
Description
This video shows how to activate the generation of SOFiSTiK Design Elements for walls in your Revit model.
These are the initial steps you need to follow to prepare your BIM model for an earthquake analysis of shear walls in the 
SOFiSTiK Structural Desktop.
First click on Analyze to open the Analysis dialog. There, make sure that the options linked to seismic analyses are active. These options are:
Under tab Geometry : the option Export Storey Levels
Under tab Analysis : the option Calculate Center of Rigidity and Center of Mass
Typically in Revit, walls elements have analytical models of type surface.
This is why, when analyzing the model as such, SOFiSTiK will generate QUAD Finite Elements for the walls.
And all results available for walls eg. in the 
Graphical Output will be QUAD results.
In order to additionally generate member results for the shear walls, we now should define for each of them Design Elements.
Note
Design Elements in SOFiSTiK are virtual member elements. They can be used to:
Group Finite/Structural Elements together
Interpolate obtain results relative to the member (independent of the Finite/Structural Element discretization)
Integrate to display e.g. QUAD results as member internal forces
More information about Design Elements can be found in the Help Manual of Module DECREATOR provided together with the SOFiSTiK Structural Desktop.
Select all the shear walls and in the SOFiSTiK Structural Properties panel, activate the property Create Design Elements. If necessary, click on Apply to validate the input. With this, the selected shear walls have been assigned an equivalent member cross section. This can be seen eg. by opening the Cross Section Mapping dialog.
When running the analysis anew, Design Element results are now available for the shear walls.
To finish preparing the BIM model for an earthquake analysis, we add the Action of type E seismic loading. Under . Add a new action of type E Seismic loading and validate all with . Save the Revit model.
You can now open the 
SOFiSTiK Structural Desktop (SSD) SOFiSTiK Structural Desktop an continue the analysis of your model.
More information about the analysis in SSD of shear walls under Earthquake excitation can be found in our SSD tutorial : https://www.sofistik.de/documentation/2020/en/tutorials/dynamics/shear-walls/shear-walls.html
See also
See also the following related Watch and Learn or Command Reference pages:
Command Reference Definition of additional Structural Properties in Revit
Note
The results integrated by Design Elements can be exported directly from Revit using 
Export to Excel.
Start Export to Excel
Make sure the result type Design Element is active
Complete the export
You can find the information and results related to Design Elements in Sheets Design Element and Design Element Forces
Tip
The YouTube tutorial videos are recorded with resolution 1920x1080 (1080p HD), therefore it is recommended to set the YouTube Quality to 1080p when watching the videos.
Tip
The video contains English captions, therefore you can follow the online video without audio.
