skane88 / LoadCombinations

Generates lists of load combinations for structural analysis.

LoadCombinations

This package is intended to generate lists of load combinations for structural analysis.

It is also intended to be a learning project as I have not created a significant Python package before, so use at your own risk.

The following approach is used to generate the combinations:

1. Load: The base element is a Load which corresponds to a specific load (i.e. Dead Load, or Wind Load)
2. LoadGroup: Loads are then combined into groups in a LoadGroup. This allows rules to be enforced such as "All the loads in this group are applied with the same factors" or "These loads rotate through a set of angles"
3. LoadCase: Load groups are then combined into a LoadCase, which corresponds to a design code Load Case (i.e. 1.2G + 1.5Q + 1.0Wu). Note tha G, Q & Wu correspond to specific LoadGroup objects, not necessarily to specific Load objects. This allows cases where, for example, wind loads need to be considered in say 4x different directions, to be specified as a single LoadCase object.
4. Each LoadCase object will output a load Combination consisting of Load objects with their associated load factors, for each possible combination. This corresponds the real design combinations - for instance in the 1.2G + 1.5Q + 1.0Wu case listed above, if wind is specified as 4x different load cases (Wux, Wuz, Wu-x, Wu-z), the load combinations returned may be:
   • 1.2G + 1.5Q + 1.0Wux
   • 1.2G + 1.5Q + 1.0Wuz
   • 1.2G + 1.5Q + 1.0Wu-x
   • 1.2G + 1.5Q + 1.0Wu-z

To simplify the end user experience, it is intended to combine these steps into a single LoadCombinations object, and additionally`provide helper functions to create load combinations from Pandas dataframes, .csv files, strings and similar methods.