Plate

The Plate command refers to a plate or bilinear surface.

To access the Plate command, go to Draw > Wire Grid / Solid Surface > Plate in the main menu. The dialog box for the Plate command contains three pages: Plate, Attributes, and Materials, detailed in Fig. 1.

The Plate page

In the Plate page, you can set the geometrical parameters for the Plate. The Plate is defined by specifying the coordinates of its four corner points. In general, a plate or bilinear surface is a non-planar quadrilateral, uniquely defined by its four vertices, as shown in Fig. 2. In some cases, the bilinear surface degenerates into a flat quadrilateral.

After setting the geometrical parameters on the Plate page, you can move on to the Attributes page. Here, you can specify the number of facets for the Plate and choose whether it should be a wire grid or a solid surface. See Grid/Surface Attributes for additional parameters in the Attributes page and Wire Materials for parameters in the Materials page.