Load panels
Areas that hand a floor, roof or wall pressure to the members around them as line loads, one way or two way, without meshing a slab.
Loads & combinations 2 min read
A floor finish of 1.5 kN/m² has to reach the beams somehow. The two old ways are to work out each beam's line load by hand, and redo it whenever a beam moves, or to model the slab as a plate and solve a shell mesh to answer a question about beams. A load panel is the third: an area drawn over the frame that carries pressure in any number of load cases and hands it to the members around it. It has no stiffness, is never meshed and adds nothing to the solve.
Drawing one
Loads › Generators › Load panel opens Add load panel. Click the panel's corners in order and press Enter to close the outline. Like a plate, a panel can have openings. The dialog says which members the panel will deliver to before you create it.
A member carries the panel when it lies in the panel's plane, within 5°, and runs along or inside its outline. That is what leaves the columns out: they cross the plane rather than lying in it. If no member qualifies, the panel says the load would go nowhere.
| Spans | How the pressure is shared |
|---|---|
| Two way | Every point goes to its nearest beam: the 45° rule, trapezoids on the long sides and triangles on the short |
| One way | Strips run along the span direction, a global axis projected onto the panel, and the beams they land on carry everything; beams parallel to the strips carry nothing |
Loading it
A panel takes surface loads like a plate does: from the load editor, the properties panel or the load table, a different pressure in each case. The properties panel shows the panel's area, the members it delivers to, the total delivered, and any part of the area that reaches no member.
The member loads are worked out at solve time from the panel's current geometry, never stored, so moving a beam or a corner redistributes the load without anything to update.
Where panels matter
- Floors and roofs on a frame, where the slab is not part of the analysis.
- Cladding: wind on a wall of girts and columns.
- The wind and snow generators, which put their zoned pressures on load panels and plates. The envelope they recognise is the panels you drew.
Panels export to IFC as the member loads they produce, which another program can read, and come back as panels when the file returns to Elementarium; see IFC structural models.
Something wrong or unclear on this page? Tell us, and it gets corrected.