Moving Load Analysis time

Question:

Good afternoon,


We have a model (see attached) that is taking an excessively long time to solve. We left it running over the weekend, only to find that it was 40% analysed in the LL and we can’t use our computers during the time MIDAS is solving.

We need to get results for the concurrent moments and shears along the beam elements, is there a way we can set up the moving load analysis to achieve this whilst speeding up the analysis time. To date, we have always created an static load Case from the Moving Tracer to work out the concurrent load effects. Unfortunately we can’t afford to resolve the whole model every time we want to get the concurrent shear/moments combinations.

Any help on this will be much appreciated.

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Answer:
Thanks for writing to us.

It can be observed from your model that we have below:
1) 8 Traffic lanes - with traffic lane optimization turned on - thereby program will create 8x3 = 24 lanes internally.
2) 10 Vehicle loads are applied.
3) 18 moving load cases.
4) Normal+concurrent force/moment turned on in "Moving load analysis control options"



Because of the above reasons computationally time will tremendously increase.
We can remove traffic lane optimization (for longitudinal design of bridge), which can remove some time from the analysis.
Furthermore, we can try using a computer with high memory card/processor to increase the analysis speed.

kindly reply back if you have any further issues.
Regards,