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UBC Theses and Dissertations

Contribution to the development of a tool to link Matlab constraint satisfaction platform to ANSYS structural models Villiard, Caroline

Abstract

Engineers have to deal with uncertainties as a challenge when pursuing the safest and most economical design. Several methods have been used over the years to deal with these uncertainties and to make this conceptual design phase more straight forward. Safety goals have been achieved due to safety coefficients found in design codes, but there is a lack of software tools to carry out risk and reliability analysis. Within the framework of University research, the novel idea of combining wood and steel as two structural members of mid-rise hybrid buildings is being studied. The need for an optimized design to start off the hybrid structure project led to this thesis, where the goal is to link the ANSYS structural analysis program to a Matlab platform for integrating probabilistic constraints. The methodology proposed by Loewen seeks to remedy the uncertainty issues encountered by engineers, and his Probability Constraint Satisfaction Program (PCSP) is the foundation of the Matlab platform developed more extensively here. This method involves subdividing the design space and estimating the potential of meeting the constraints according to the probability distribution of the data in each interval. An advantage output of this technique are design spaces combining probabilities of various data. The structural component of this thesis involves formatted files serving as input for ANSYS program were created to automatically model multistorey hybrid steel-wood structures. Some frameworks and a literature review introduce the pros and cons of this type of construction. Many issues are dealt with during the modeling phase whereas some are left to the future developing stage. Simplified examples leading to an understanding of the methodology developed to build an efficient link are shown to illustrate the essence of the research done. Additional computations were added to the programs script files and resulted in a powerful tool that was put to the test with two different examples- a simple hybrid frame and a multistorey steel structure. As a result of this work on the example structures, the PCSP method produced design spaces, presented to the reader.

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Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International