Organizing Seams and Breaks

This task explains the organization of seams and breaks, and their relationship to plates and stiffeners.

 

1. Plates and stiffeners have a parent/child organization, which means that they have an object and a child object. This organization was implemented to handle plates and stiffeners that have seams. When first created, plates and stiffeners already have this organization (as shown in the tree structure below).

The geometry (support, offset, and limits) is stored in the object. If you want to change the geometry, you must edit the object. The material and orientation attributes (material, grade, thickness (plate), section (stiffener), and orientation) are stored in the object and the child object. If you want to change an attribute for a specific child object, you must edit that child object. If you want to change an attribute for all of the child objects, you must edit the object.

2. After seams are added to plates and stiffeners, the objects are split into more children. The image below shows what happens when two seams are placed on a plate and on a stiffener.

3. As you can see, there are Sets that are included in this architecture.

  4. If breaks (instead of seams) are put on an object, then rather than the object being split into child objects, new objects are created. In the case shown below, 2 breaks were added to the plate. Unlike seams, breaks can NOT be removed. Separate objects are created. There are no break elements saved.