Faster area2lineload.py

[kowalskiw]

The area2lineload.py script from structures is terribly slow. It took c.a. 30 min to run an example structure with 10k beam elements and 360 different load areas. And there were no edges routine implemented, only fully supported areas.

IMHO there are some bottlenecks, which I listed below. This improvements have to be done ASAP, to make the script practicable. Nevertheless, simple cases still can be covered with the current version.

1. Get meshing from .IN file - when the structure will be meshed exactly in the same pattern (same edge nodes) there will be no need to iterate over reaction nodes to find the two nearest points for interpolation. Resolution of the mesh would be exact - no overestimation and shorter SAFIR calculations. It can cause some bugs in gmsh API.
2. Less timestep for dummy shells - there are 10 timesteps, 1 s each to be calculated for a dummy shell. This value could be lower. However good reaction estimation should be achieved. 3 time steps seems like a safe and low-cost solution.
3. Assign summed loads - load from each dummy is assigned in single LOAD command. Thus, it is possible to visualize only the first load case (LOAD command). To see the sum of loads implemented by the script, it is required to sum it per element.

Any help with these would be very appreciated, as well as some other weaknesses of the code.

[kowalskiw]

Point 2 - done. There are only three one-second time steps for each dummy shell.