2D STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS EDUCATIONAL SOFTWARE: A FORCE PROCESS SIMULATOR USING FREECAD

Resumo

The technological advances and the consequent modernization in various sectors of society evidence
and foster the emerging tendencies to the usage of computational tools in behalf of the analysis of structures, more
specifically with regard to the field of Civil Engineering. Along with it, the training of future engineers with the
use of new methodologies that assist in the teaching-learning process, is frequently debated and encouraged.
Among these educational tools, stand out those that have an appeal in computational mechanics based in the use
of numerical methods with a very well characterized and absorbed theoretical basis. In this context, knowledge of
the behavior of structural systems is essential, especially when using numerical analysis methods and their
computational implementations. In undergraduate courses that deal with hyperstatic structures, two solution
methods are studied: the Displacement Method and the Force Method. The Force Method, despite having a very
consistent physical appeal and being the one that better represents the structural behavior, does not have an
interesting approach for an integral computational implementation. In this circumstance, the present work intends
to present an expert software developed for computer-assisted learning of the Force Process. The idea is to have a
Simulator of the Flexibility Process with the explanation of each of its steps, so that the user, a structural mechanics
student, can interact not only by entering initial data and obtaining the final analysis data. On the contrary, he will
have the definition/explanation of his choice of the fundamental isostatic model and the subsequent steps of its
systems, leading to the obtention of the flexibility matrix of the simulated problem. The computational code was
written in Python, using FreeCAD, an open parametric modeling software, as the user interaction platform, taking
advantage of its graphical directives and its interoperability with the Python language. The simulation is done by
using personalized buttons for data entry, inherent to the pre-processing stage of the application, that is, the stage
of modeling the structure, which is presented visually, in order to facilitate the user ́s understanding. Subsequently,
the program calls for the computational processing of the plane structure and presents each step of the Force
Method. For