Exporting Plates

Panels in the base product are to be transferred as Plates. This covers 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 base product’s penetration functionality 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 exported. Refer to Transferring Holes for further information.

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

The Material Grade transferred represents the material type. This is a text attribute, rather than the number field in the base product. Therefore a User Defined Attribute (UDA), :FABMGRADE, has been defined within the base product 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 above criteria is not satisfied, the plate does not get exported in the output file.

Note:
This has an effect on the subsequent import process as the plate will appear to have been deleted by AVEVA Bocad Steel since its export. In fact, the plate never made the transfer in the first place.

Once the Plate has been output, the relevant UDAs specific for the interface associated with Export are updated. These are principally the element's internal ID and the UUID numbers and transfer and revision numbers.

Although both plates and holes are supposed to have a clockwise definition (right hand screw rule) for their boundaries in either the base product or in the 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.

Note:
Importing a Plate previously defined in base product, you may find the order of vertices to have been reversed.

Plates with curved and straight segments to their boundaries can be transferred both to and from the base product. Because of the difference between the base product and boundary definitions, vertices will 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. This makes it 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 AVEVA Bocad Steel Interface file.