Modeling of Flexible Members in RAFT

[hymdrj]

Dear All,

RAFT says that joints are required to model flexible platform beam members.

However, the platform member input only seems to contain rA and rB:

dict_keys([
    'name', 'type', 'rA', 'rB', 'extensionA', 'extensionB', 'shape',
    'gamma', 'potMod', 'stations', 'd', 't', 'Cd', 'Ca', 'CdEnd',
    'CaEnd', 'rho_shell', 'l_fill', 'rho_fill', 'cap_stations',
    'cap_t', 'cap_d_in'
])

The RAFT standalone input format also appears to define platform members using only rA and rB.

But when I change the platform member type from rigid to beam in omdao_raft.py (line 564), I get this error:

Exception: 'raft.raft' <class RAFT_OMDAO>: Error calling compute(), To model platforms with flexible members, RAFT needs joints in the input data.

Could you please confirm the intended input format for flexible platform members?
It is currently unclear how joints are supposed to be provided when the platform member definition only exposes rA and rB.

[dzalkind]

Here is an example in RAFT for flexible platform members: https://github.com/NLRWindSystems/RAFT/blob/f2a708db1273263ad206075a35f3165cdc1955f0/examples/VolturnUS-S-flexible_example.yaml#L1085

WEIS doesn't (yet) support the generation of flexible RAFT members, but that would be a welcome community addition. That example would be a good target. I don't think the maintainers have any plans to implement this in the near term.