I am wondering if there is a bug in the cross section range selector. Is it supposed to provide the sections ordered by height, then weight, or it is not meant to work like that?
If it is meant to do that, I find that the order is close, but not perfectly correct.
Also, within the W10 category, the order is not correct for the weights.
There are quite a few examples like this and it means that the cross-section optimiser would not iterate in a meaningful way (it could find a suitable section that is accidentally lower in the list, but heavier, and stop iterating).
I am able to do my own sorting, so it’s not a problem, but just wondered if it might be a bug in the selector.
Dear Dragos,
Thank you for your post! The cross sections should be ordered first by height and then by weight. I reviewed the W-section output, and it appears correct to me:
The W12X170 is placed among the W14 cross sections, but the ordering seems correct.
Since the W-family of cross sections includes a wide variety of shapes, it might be beneficial to divide them into subsections. I found this that provides an overview of these sections.
Attached is the definition from which I took the above screenshots: 250312_OrderOfCrossSections.gh (12.3 KB)
– Clemens
Thanks so much for the reply. You are right that they are indeed ordered by height and then weight. But the height ordering is based on the actual height, not the “designation height”.
So for example, one typically wants to choose a W10 or W12 section, and get the most efficient one from that “sub-category”. And W10 then means a height of ~10in. Within the W10 range there are small differences in height, not all are exactly 10in.
So that’s where the difference is. We can therefore conclude that the component is functioning correctly. But from a design perspective, an ordering that follows the designation is also useful. I have done my own sorting and filtering based on this logic, as shown below.
