Analysis

On the Analysis icons you can choose some general settings for the wall specification and the layout of the output.

The method of analysis is also selected – see Methodology for further details on the 2 methods that can be employed.

General Settings

Under the General Settings option you can select which Specifications are relevant to your wall design. These selections will affect the design, eg, if the wall is more than 2 storeys high, or the live load is a storage load. A faced wall will reduce the fk by a factor of 0.8. A faced wall is a wall with facing units bonded to backing units so as to result in common action under load.

The Output area allows the you to select which components of output to display in the design output area, and to export or print.

The output for the middle, left, right, top and bottom panels is only relevant when utilising the Panel Method and where openings are specified. Otherwise the ‘Main Wall’ on its own will give all the relevant calcs for a wall analysed using the Advanced Yield Line Method with or without openings.

Analysis

As described above, you can utilise either the Panel Method or the Advanced Yield Line Method to analyse the wall. To use the panel method, make sure the Use AYLA button is off – it should have the same colour as the background if this is the case.

Describe the Auto-solve, Draw Lines options – how they work and what they do.

The Auto-solve button can be selected – this means that for every single change of data the wall will be reanalysed immediately. This is ok if you intend to change only one item of data before you need the wall reanalysed. However, if you intend to change a number of items of data, it is better to leave this option off and wait until all the data has been modified before analysing the wall using the Analyse option instead. This will save time overall.

The Draw Lines option will display the yield lines on the wall elevation. The thicker the yield line the greater the yielding at that position. Blue yield lines indicate yielding into the screen whilst green yield lines indicate yielding in the opposite direction, usually occurring near the edge supports or corners.

If the Advanced Yield Line analysis method is used, the Node Density is selected from the Analyse drop list. The node density options are coarse, medium, fine and super fine. Generally, the coarse or medium densities are sufficient to produce a good yield line analysis result. However, if the unity ratio after analysis is close to 1, say, above 0.95, the user should consider using a more refined node density of 'fine' or 'super fine'. This will give a more refined assessment of the yield line patterns and hence a more accurate solution.