Limitations and known issues

This page lists the current limitations and known issues in PREFAB.

Shell elements – Plane Plate, Profiled Plate, Plane Wall, Profiled Wall and Fictitious Shell can be used as plates or walls, but only results for elements with a normal vector of zero in the global Z-direction (walls) will be printed
Edge connections – need to be straight lines; they can't take the shapes of circles or circular segments
Design checks – not performed for bar elements of any kind, nor for shell elements with a material other than concrete
Variable thickness – the shell elements (Plane Plate, Profiled Plate, Plane Wall and Profiled Wall) are not allowed to have variable thicknesses

Export reactions to StruXML – has limitations and a higher frequency of unbalanced forces. It will be picked up by PREFAB and informed. The exported reactions might differ from the PDF print in specific cases (hence the BETA status)

Element types – plastic redistribution only works for shell elements + trusses, i.e. columns and beams need to be modeled with shells
Thin shell elements – it is recommended that shell elements aren't modelled too thin when using the plastic solver. Due to the limit of f_cd · t being reached so early, the solver is "locked"

Limitations and known issues​