[Hessam1358]

Currently I use Strand7 FEM, which might not be familiar to you, however, it's very popular in Australia. I have surfed through Youtube but yet am not sure if Abaqus has some of the capabilities that Strand7 has. The below are some of them, which are my questions:

1- Creating a beam section. In Strand7, we can import a complex 2D dxf and assign it as beam section. What I see is in Abaqus just simple basic sections could be created, unless you redraw it in Abaqus area, which means increasing the risk of mistakes and deviations. There is another option and that is creating the whole beam as a 3D model in Solidworks or Autocad or similar software and import it as a Iges file, which means a second software should be accompanied with Abaqus. So, please let me know what do you reckon, is it possible to import a 2D dxf file into Abaqus and assign it as a beam section?

2- If there was anyway for question 1, is Abaqus able to calculate the section properties i.e. Moment of inertia in both directions, centroid, torsional constant, giration radius, etc.?

3- When a model was analysed and the results are shown as 3D contours, the only way for saving these contours is taking screenshot and we can not save them as a pdf file. Correct?

Thanks in advance for your reply.

Hessam