Richard Hollamby, COWI UK Bridge, RIHY

2018-02-27

Provides useful classes and functions to faciliate the general dynamic analysis of 2nd order structural systems, as characterised by their mass, stiffness, damping and constraints.

This package is intended to serve as a structured repository for such content. At present all modules are written by Richard Hollamby (COWI UK Bridge, RIHY). However the aim is that others should feel able (and are strongly encouraged!) to participate by submitting improvements. The only proviso for this is that code improvements should be written to be project-independent.

The overriding aim is for this package to be reliable, testable, and developed in such a way that its performance and capabilities improve with time, due to time investment made during projects.

Applications include (but are not limited to):

• Time history analysis:

  • Based on full mass, stiffness and damping matrices

  • As above, but for systems with multi-point constraints

  • For systems represented by a (usually truncated) set of modes

  • For systems with non-proportional damping

• TMD design and analysis

• Response spectrum analysis of ground motion time series data

• Pedestrian response analyses:

  • Transient response per UK NA to BS EN 1992-1 approach (walkers/joggers)

  • Steady-state crowd loading:

  • UK NA to BS EN 1992-1 approach (vertical response)

  • HiVoSS approach (vertical and lateral responses)

  • Lateral instability under crowd loading

Benefits of using this package:

• Fully-documented python API (see Docs link), where a rich html API is generated from docstrings in source code using pdoc and Markdown syntax.

• All routines written in Python 3, to allow dynamic analysis to be carried out within a more general routine, or used as an import in IPython notebook

• As everything is public (in principle) in Python, users familiar with the source code have options:

  1. Add new functionality, to extent the capabilities of this package (please consult RIHY to discuss long-term incorporation of improvements)

  2. Tweak existing functionality, for a given application (this is generally project-specific, so would not be incorporated)

This project is hosted on GitHub and uses Git to provide robust version control