Perform calculations for structural parts using Custom Portions

Did you know you can use Consteel to run second-order and buckling analyses on specific parts or elements of your model by defining a Custom Portion for the portion of interest?

The workflow starts in the Portions Manager, where you can manually group structural members, frames, columns, beams, bracings into Custom Portions. These are fully user-defined and, importantly, only these custom portions can be directly used for analysis. This allows you to isolate exactly the structural subsystem you want to investigate, without being constrained by the full model.

Once a portion is defined, it can be selected in the Analysis Settings, where you can choose whether second-order and buckling analyses should be performed on the entire model or only on the selected portion. The solver will then consider only that subset of elements when assembling the stiffness matrix and evaluating stability behavior.

Running these analyses on specific portions has clear engineering advantages. Second-order effects and buckling phenomena are often governed by local structural behavior, such as a critical frame, a bracing system, or a column group, rather than the entire structure. By isolating these regions, you can:

• reduce computational effort and analysis time, especially for large models
• focus on the most critical load paths and instability mechanisms
• perform faster iterations during design refinement
• avoid unnecessary influence from non-relevant parts of the structure

This targeted approach leads to more efficient and controlled stability analysis, particularly when investigating sensitive or highly utilized structural components.

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