Parent/Child Similarity |
  
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Parent/Child Similarity |
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When assigning new children to a parent beam, it is advisable for the new children to be as similar to the parent beam as possible. Child beams are not analyzed separately, nor will the user be alerted if a child beam is significantly different than the parent in critical ways that could result in an unsafe design. It is the responsibility of the design professional to ensure that any parent/child relationships are appropriate and will result in a safe design.
When adding children with reactions, certain error checking is performed to ensure the integrity of the load linking load path. These checks will result in a warning if the user specifies a child beam that does not share common supports with the parent beam. This discrepancy will harm the accuracy of the load path unless corrected. When such a disagreement is detected, the user is notified with an option to either correct the support conditions or drop the child from the list.
When the warning is presented, the corresponding child element is automatically selected for reference.
Selecting “Drop This Child” will result in this specific child element being skipped while the remaining children without warnings are added. Selecting “Specify Child Supports” will lead the user through a process of clarifying the support conditions of the child beam in order to preserve load path integrity.
The support that belongs to the parent but does not apply to the child is presented for user reference. Clicking “OK” on this notification will prompt the user to select a replacement support for the ambiguous end of the new child element.
Picking the replacement support will complete the operation and the Element Manager and color highlighting will refresh. 
Since the supporting relationships have been manually corrected, the stored reaction on the newly created child beam will automatically be detected and applied when launching a design calculation for the neighboring girder.
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