Is there any way I can design a plate element (for example a flat plate) using FEM program.

These contour plots a not useful to have a quick insight on the analysis results.

We can defined the section cuts according to the strips defined in the ACI 318 code.

The output for the strips shall be the more familiar bending moment and shear force diagram plotted along the length of the strips.

An extra advantage of the diagrams will be that a diagrams (bending moment, shear force and axial force) for different load combinations can be drawn on one plot simultaneously, hence easy to determine the governing load combinations.

The structure consists of two bays in x-direction and two bays in y-direction.

The slab is loaded by self weight of the slab and live load of 5 KNm2.

Design the flat plate using section cut techniques in SAP2000.

Since the flat plate is symmetrical in two directions, one needs to define section cuts in one direction and for half the slab).

Since the flate plate is symmetrical in two directions, one needs to define strips in one direction and for half the slab.

Hence two column strips and one middle strip is marked on the figure 1.

Now the section cuts are to be defined to capture the total force (Shear force, bending moment and axial force) in the width of the strip.

For this purpose, 5 section cuts are to be defined in each span for each strip (10 section cuts per strip).

It is preferable that the cutting plane be kept slightly away from the nodes, because sometimes SAP2000 is unable to process the output for the section cuts exactly at the nodes, and report a zero values.

Therefore the cutting pane is defined such that the slab is cut by the plane.

For this example M22 gives the bending moment about y-axis, and F33 gives the shear force along the length of strip.

The sign of the forces at most of the occasions has to be corrected manually.

This is pretty easy to do).

You have to take care that what section forces report you need on the right and which sections should report on the left.

Sap2000 Shell Stress Averaging