Relative Displacement Tool

The Relative Displacement tool interactively helps you create the TH/SPRING card, which supports time histories with spring output. This tool appears as a tab named Relative Displacement.

To display the tool, select Relative Displacement from the Utility menu. The tool appears as a tab in the tab area.

tab_relative_displace

1.	To begin creating a time history of springs, type a name in the Time History Name field and click Create/Edit.

A pop-up menu appears from which you can choose either to create the spring and edit the card that is generated or simply create the spring.

2.	The time history appears in the Output Blocks list. Right-click the list item and select Add Springs to create springs for that time history.

3.	You are prompted to pick nodes from the model to define springs.

Note:

The first node you select is used as Node1 in the definition of the spring.

1.	To edit a time history, right-click its name in the Output Blocks list and select Edit. The card for that time history opens in the main panel area.

2.	From here you can provide names for each element, and add or modify variables. To add variables, click NUM_VA to open a pop-up window of numbers. Click the number of variables you want to include in the card. Var fields appear where you can type the variable names.

When you use the Relative Displacement tool to create time histories of springs, you also create a component named Comp_Rel_Disp. This component is of the Springs/Rivets type and no material is assigned. The component contains one property, SPR_GENE, with only the mass value specified.