Topology and Coordinates

The PAFEC element types supported are displayed in Table 2.1. In processing a PAFEC element in general only the topology is considered when mapping to a FEMVIEW element type. For example, all QU8 elements are treated in the same way whether they are structural or thermal,isotropic with 1 or 3 surfaces or orthotropic with `n' layers. The only exceptions to this are the recovery of results for beams where only certain beam types are represented in the beam stress file, and in the recovery of stresses where the number of surfaces and layers are relevant. Spring elements 30100 are recovered as beams provided the user has specified two nodes in the ELEMENTS module. Any element with a node number of zero will be ignored.