Tekla Structural Designer Inactive Members

Engineers often find themselves in situations where they need to model certain members to allow for load distribution in a manner they'd expect, however they don't want these members affecting the primary superstructure. An example would be secondary/ tertiary members such as Purlins and Rails supporting cladding which are typically modeled primarily to decompose wind wall and roof loads and provide design restraints to main structural members. These members however may develop internal forces - such as axial loads - and/ or cause additional forces in the main structural members that are neither expected nor desired by the engineer. Furthermore, their results can clutter analysis diagrams, obscuring the results of the main structural members in which the engineer is primarily interested. Both of these problems can now be avoided by using the new Inactive Member feature. By setting such members to be inactive, load applied to the inactive members is applied as required to the main structure (during the pre-analysis load decomposition stage), but they are not included in the analysis model and thus do not develop any internal forces.