Our aim in this section is to bring together the work we’ve done on mesh generation in section 6 with the finite element code we’ve developed earlier in the course - both our own custom FE code and the library-based workflows. In this section, we’ll focus on OpenSeesPy, but you should have no problem piping your custom mesh data into a Pynite model by now.

We’ll start off by modifying our OpenSeesPy FE pipeline to accept our generated mesh as input. This is a fantastic combination since it brings together two powerhouse libraries, providing you with massive analysis potential.

After we have our custom mesh analysis completed, powered by OpenSeesPy, this will serve as another validation benchmark as we feed our custom mesh into our own Reissner-Mindlin FE code. This is going to surface a very peculiar pattern of displacement in our mesh - something that isn’t replicated in the OpenSeesPy version of our analysis. This turns out to be our first sight of the zero-energy spurious displacements we briefly mentioned earlier in the course.

Towards the end of this section, we’ll unpack where these nonsensical displacements come from and outline a plan to deal with them in the final section of the course.