LAS - Un langage de programmation et un environnement de développement destinés à l'apprentissage assité par ordinateur de l'analyse matricielle des structures

Abstract

Structural engineers interact daily with"black box" type software. These programs, which are more user-friendly than ever, are used to draw a structure and to define loads, material properties and dynamic properties. The program analyses and designs the structure in matter of seconds. All the calculation process is hidden from the engineer. Educational softwares are therefore required to teach the internal processes of theses blackboxes. This thesis presents LAS, which stands for Language for Analysis of Structures . LAS is a high-level programming language and a development environment (software) for learning matrix structural analysis, dynamics of structures and the finite elements method. LAS is a flexible learning environment for structural or numerical analyses because users must fully program their own solution to solve a problem. The programming language includes matrix variables, powerful operators, conditional branches, conditional loops, and several functions. These functions carry-out matrix manipulation, resolution of linear equations, eigenvalue problems, singular value decomposition, frequency analysis (fast Fourier transforms & spectrums), generation of finite element matrices, direct stiffness assembly of these matrices and static and dynamic analysis. The latter can be accomplished in the time domain, modal domain or frequency domain. The development environment is a program used to create, edit and execute LAS code as well as finite element postprocessing and data visualization. It contains a calculator module and a graphical user interface. The latter includes a code editor, an output viewer, a matrix manager, a finite element post-processor and a Fourier-analysis tool. At the time of writing, LAS was used in the"Dynamics of structures" course (graduate) and was scheduled to be used in"Structures II" course (undergraduate). The language and development environment will be updated according to the needs of their users.