Dear Mohammed, in ATENA Engineering it is possible to apply temperature as load, however, it is only possible to define a constant temperature increase/decrease for each macroelement. If you have a simple-enough geometry, you might be able to divide your asphalt and cocnrete layers each into several macroelements and assign the corresponding temperature to each macroelements.

In ATENA Science, you can define linear temperature gradients. If this is not enough, you can run thermal analysis first and then import the resulting field(s) into static analysis (see the ATENA Science Example Manual, chapter "3. TRANSPORT ANALYSIS").

In any case, remember the loading is incremental in ATENA. This means you can first apply the temperature gradient and then the traffic forces, and this results in both of them acting on the structure.

Hello, you first define a few load steps applying the load cases with supports+thermal load. Then, define the steps with the supports+the traffic load.

Please read section "5.3.1 Shell Material" of the ATENA-GiD User's Manual.

Hello, the value from the "Constant" tab is also used (to define the value at coordinate origin). The 3 coefficients define the dependence of the temperature on the 3 coordinate directions. The exact formula is specified in the help text.

Dear Mohammed, direct support for these is only only implemented in the ATENA Engineering 2D GUE (Moment lines, MNQ). The main reason for this situation is that these values are typically not of much interest within nonlinear analysis (unlike linear design calculations).

If you need these quantities (please explain - maybe there is some other way to get the information of your interest), you need to integrate the corresponding internal forces outside of ATENA, e.g., in a spreadsheet.

Dear Mohammed, please do not forget the formulas for hand calculations most likely (99%) have been developed for elastic models, and would not work correctly when applied to the forces and moments from the nonlinear analysis (cracked structure). Therefore, to get proper input for the formulas, I would recommend to run a separate elastic-only calculation with the same loading, or simply calculate the elastic deformations analytically, too.

Dear Mohammed, the most common approach to ULS using nonlinear analysis is applying the design load (multiplied by a security factor) to the model (instead of checking the stresses, moments, etc. as usual for linear models). Frequently, one simply applies the nominal load level and then increases the load up to the peak and the ratio of the max. calculated load to the design nominal load is then compared to the required security factor.
If there are multiple load combinations suspected of being "the worst", the above has to be done for each of them and the worst of them decides.

Please see the tab "Restart Calculation from Calculated Step" in teh Problem Data dialog.

Unusal tasks frequently require tedious work (automation is concentrated to the frequent ones). Formulas based on cracked state AND considering moments (except for the design ones simply ignoring all concrete in tension) are not common. Maybe if you post what exactly you plan to calculate, we can find some easier way, but I suspect you need the spreadsheet.

Dear Mohammed, withou seeing your model it is impossible to guess what is going on. Before anything else, I recommend to check if the meshes being compared look reasonable, above all, if the edge aspect ratio (i.e., length of the longest edge to the length of the shortest edge of an element) is under about 3:1 for volume elements.

Dear dobromil,

You told me:
If you need these quantities (---), you need to integrate the corresponding internal forces outside of ATENA, e.g., in a spreadsheet.

I have defined monitoring points at the relevant mesh nodes in order to get the values of the forces there to calculate the bending moments. But I have got only ''---'' instead of the values. Could you please help?

regards

Thank you
In the Output Data dialog of AtenaWin, it is possible to output the internal forces for nodes only, not for IPs also?!!