Display function that uses US nomenclature

[jwprusi]

The existing Section.display_results() function outputs a table using (I think) New Zealand nomenclature for the properties. This has some significant differences with US usage. The most critical is that in the US we use "S" for the elastic section modulus, and "Z" for the plastic section modulus, exactly opposite from the usage in sectionproperties. This provides significant opportunity for errors, especially when archiving results or passing them to others (cf other discussion of printing results to a file).

I'd propose something like a new method Section.display_AISC(), using a new post.print_AISC() to use US nomenclature for output as defined by the American Institute of Steel Construction.

I have subclassed Section to create these function for my use, but implementation was easy to write rather than robust and matching existing implementation. (It iterates over a dict that crosswalks the nomenclature, then directly reads SectionProperties.<property> rather than using the Section.get_<property>). If this feature seems useful to others I can either look at creating a new function that is in line with existing, or refactoring the existing function to print with US nomenclature.

Edit to add:
My proposed output looks something like this:

┏━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┓
┃ Property  ┃         Value ┃ Explanation                                 ┃
┡━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┩
│ A         │  3.100790e+00 │ Cross-sectional area                        │
│ perimeter │  1.862900e+01 │ Cross-sectional perimeter                   │
│ Qx        │ -3.504141e-15 │ First moment of area about the x-axis       │
│ Qy        │  1.538588e+00 │ First moment of area about the y-axis       │
.......................
│ x₀        │  4.961921e-01 │ X coordinate of the elastic centroid        │
│ y₀        │ -1.130080e-15 │ Y coordinate of the elastic centroid        │
│ Ix_c      │  1.524298e+01 │ Second moment of area about the centroidal  │
│           │               │ x-axis                                      │
│ Iy_c      │  8.487891e-01 │ Second moment of area about the centroidal  │
│           │               │ y-axis                                      │
│ Ixy_c     │ -1.091095e-15 │ Second moment of area about the centroidal  │
│           │               │ xy-axis                                     │
│ Sx+       │  5.080992e+00 │ Section modulus about the centroidal x-axis │
│           │               │ for stresses at the positive extreme value  │
│           │               │ of y                                        │
│ Sx-       │  5.080992e+00 │ Section modulus about the centroidal x-axis │
│           │               │ for stresses at the negative extreme value  │
│           │               │ of y                                        │

(This example includes the nomenclature explanation as proposed in the other discussion, with nomenclature=True set. It also includes some extended Unicode subscripts that probably aren't a good idea for wide use.)

[robbievanleeuwen]

Hi @jwprusi I would also welcome this addition to support engineers all over the world! Also note I have recently added the display_transformed_results() which could also be modified!