Shear panel sections transmit shear forces along edges but cannot transmit normal forces. Structures modeled by these sections have no bending stiffness; therefore, you should include reinforcing truss or beam elements. These sections are for use in small-displacement analysis and can be used only with linear elastic material behavior. Large-rotation effects, thermal strain effects, and material/element-based viscous damping effects are not included. Shell sections are applied to surfaces that—from a geometric standpoint—have no thickness; a thickness is assigned to the surface geometry as part of the shell section definition. The thickness can be either a constant value or use spatially distributed thickness data. | ||||||||||||