I have a simply supported 5 ft square weldment made from21x44 W beams. It has several cross beams, a top plate, a doubler plate and many gussets and stiffeners. I ran some tests on individual beams using shell pairs with good results (compared to standard beam equations). The problem is that I am having trouble creating the shell pairs on the complete assembly. Would it be wrong/incorrect/stupid to analyze it using solid elements? I'm not concerened about the run time.
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