Advanced Plotting

All plots in sectionproperties allow keyword arguments to be passed to plotting_context(). This example shows one application of using the plotting_context() to generate a custom plot in a 2 x 2 arrangement.

Create Geometry and Perform Analysis

We start by creating the geometry for a 100 x 6 SHS.

from sectionproperties.pre.library import rectangular_hollow_section


geom = rectangular_hollow_section(d=100, b=100, t=6, r_out=15, n_r=8)

Next we create a mesh and a Section object.

from sectionproperties.analysis import Section


geom.create_mesh(mesh_sizes=[5])
sec = Section(geometry=geom)

We can now perform a stress analysis by applying a 10 kN.m torsion (after first running the geometric and warping analysis).

sec.calculate_geometric_properties()
sec.calculate_warping_properties()
stress = sec.calculate_stress(mzz=10e6)

Generate Plot

We are going to generate a plot of the geometry, mesh, centroids and stress. In the first plot, we will setup the parameters of the entire figure. We make sure we set render=False to prevent the plot from displaying before we are finished. In the subsequent plots we pass the axis we would like to display the plot on.

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt


# plot the geometry
ax = geom.plot_geometry(
    labels=[],
    nrows=2,
    ncols=2,
    figsize=(12, 7),
    render=False,
)

# get the figure object from the first plot
fig = ax.get_figure()

# plot the mesh
sec.plot_mesh(materials=False, ax=fig.axes[1])

# plot the centroids
sec.plot_centroids(ax=fig.axes[2])

# plot the torsion stress
stress.plot_stress(
    stress="mzz_zxy",
    normalize=False,
    ax=fig.axes[3],
)

# finally display the plot
plt.show()