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[FAQ]

What is the difference between Reaction Force and Reaction Resultant in structural physics?

In the results section, there are two different features provided in Discovery (Refine and explore) viz. Reaction force and Reaction resultant in structural physics.

The Reaction Force is a distributed result across the face of the support whereas, the Reaction Resultant is the sum of the forces across the entire geometric face.

When multiple supports are used, a better judgement of how the force be distributed can be gauged using reaction force  plots.

For the following case,

If you have multiple faces in a support condition (as shown above) then you may see that the Reaction Resultant looks like a different solid color for each face (and the force distribution is over the entire support, showing which support takes more load),

Whereas the Reaction Force looks like a more continuous gradient of color across all the associated faces (to show how it is distributed over one support).