Elastic stress vectors are graphical representation of the intensity and orientation of the stresses within a body. To further convey information, the iConc applet uses the convention to show tension stresses in red and compression stresses in blue. You can activate the mode to visualize the stress vector in the menu Results – Concrete relative stresses – Varying length. As before, using the right mouse button allows amplifying of reduce the length of the displayed vectors. The display that you have on your screen should now approximately look as shown in Figure 15. Notice the blue compression areas under the loading plates and the red tensile stresses in the lower part of the beam. The main red areas are where we will add reinforcement bars for the more realistic non-linear concrete calculation.
If you want to keep your iConc results, you may save them using the File – Save menu. Here also, the data will be saved on the i-concrete web server. After that, you can close the iConc Window or tab and return to the iMesh applet.
Figure 15: Elastic stress vectors for the beam. The stress vectors are oriented in the indicated directions, and their intensity varies with the length of the vector. Blue indicates compressive stresses and red indicates tensile stresses.
