The properties of the steel elements that are connected by a joint, in Advance Design Steel Connection, are managed by the "Support Beams" icon from the "Tools" ribbon.
This icon will open the "Support Beams" properties window. For example we will use a "Gusset plate for 3 diagonals", beams to column joint. The column will have the general name of "main beam" and the bracings will be named "secondary beams".
For the column properties the user must click on the "Main Beam" properties field:
In the main beam properties window, the user can change the column section and the column material; also the user can adjust the column relative position from the secondary beams plane.
On the "Secondary Beam 1" properties tab, the user can modify the section and material of the beam and can adjust the position of the beam inside the joint. The beam position is defined by rotation around two axes:
- "2. Angle around axis" defines the angle of the beam with the horizontal
The properties of "Secondary Beam 2" and "Secondary Beam 3" can be edited in the same way.
If the connection was imported from Advance Design, the support beams properties and the forces cannot be edited from the Advance Design Steel Connection options. These parameters were defined and calculated by Advance Design and changing them would invalidate the calculations from the Advance Design analysis. Accessing the "Support Beams" icon will allow the user to see the support beams properties, without the possibility to change them.