Export Plates

Panels in the application are to be transferred as Plates using Packet 20, inclusive of stiffeners, floor and toe plates. Bent plates are also transferred if they are expressed as their component flat plates. If Bent Plates are to be treated as Angle linear members then they should be modelled as such.

If the Penetration Application is used to generate Catalogue holes, the resultant holes, kicker plates and stiffeners are not exported because they are contained in a Catalogue definition. Some holes and negative primitives can be transferred from the model.

The Description attribute is used to store the flooring type, such as grating or chequer plate and is passed as the type field (up to 24 characters).

The Material Grade transferred in Packet 20 represents the material type. It is a text attribute, rather than the number field in the application. Therefore a User Defined Attribute (UDA), :SDNFMGRADE, has been defined within the application to store this information.

Note:
Any edge preparation details and modelling, such as grinding, will be lost in the transfer operation.

A basic series of tests is performed before the Plate is exported.

• Is there any geometry?

• Is the height valid?

• Is it justified correctly?

• Does it have a valid material?

• Are there enough vertices?

If any of the criteria is not satisfied, the plate does not get exported in the SDNF output file.

Note:
Subsequent import processes are affected if the plate appears to have been deleted by the external steel detailing package since its export. In fact, the plate might never made the transfer to the Target Package in the first place.

Once the Plate has been output, the relevant UDAs specific for the interface associated with Export are updated. These are the mark numbers, the Export date and time and transfer and revision numbers.

Note: In Exporting a Plate, it has to be converted to the SDNF standard of being defined in a clockwise direction relative to the plane normal. Thus Importing a Plate previously defined in Model, you may find the order of vertices to have been reversed. Model is more tolerant about the ways in which you can define a plate.

Although both plates and holes are supposed to have a clockwise definition (right hand screw rule) for their boundaries in either the application or in the SDNF file, the interface must be able to cope with either clockwise or anti clockwise directions. In exporting plates the vertex order is converted to satisfy the right-hand screw rule.

Complex Plates (Type 1)

Plates with curved and straight segments to their boundaries can be transferred both to and from the application. Because of the difference between the application and SDNF boundary definitions, vertices stand a high chance of being created in different places. Further, in order to recreate the shape, there may be a different number of vertices in the boundary. It can become very difficult to compare the boundaries, especially on import.

In order to assist the transfer of these complex shapes, the vertices are given a type code as a design parameter. The code indicates whether the following boundary segment is straight, an arc, or whether the vertex is a created one not contained in the SDNF file.

Complex Plates (Type 2 - Circular Ones)

Circular plates in the application are identified by the number of vertices, the geometry and possibly the vertex type codes. There is no short-hand definition of a circular plate in the application. As a result, a certain amount of geometric testing is involved in identifying and exporting circular plates. The interface recognizes only 4 or 5 point circles, where the 5th point is a duplicate of the first point.

Error and Log File Messages