A new version of STAAD Foundation Advanced has been recently released. This is V8i SELECT series 1 release and the program version is 6.1. This is the first update of STAAD Foundation Advanced.
This version addresses long standing issues like net bearing capacity and net pressure checks. A newly added feature — anchor bolt library — takes the program one step forward to being the complete foundation design workflow. It also gives the hint that in the near future, anchor bolt design will be incorporated in the program and will be integrated with foundation design to automatically pick up the most suitable anchor bolt from the chosen library. This version checks the minimum required pedestal size for a given anchor bolt layout.
Because of these additional new pages, there are some changes in the main navigator layout. “Column Dimension” page is split into “Column Dimension” and “Pedestal Dimension”. You can create your own anchor bolt layout library through “Anchor Bolt Library” page and a layout from that library can be assigned to a pedestal.
The other change in main navigator is the position of “Soil Bearing Capacity Factors”. This page has been moved from “Loads and Factors” group to a new group called “Soil Properties”.
Important Enhancements
Two most important enhancements are
Bearing capacity type
The “Global Settings” dialog now has an option to choose bearing capacity type. All previous versions assumed that bearing capacity as a design parameter is always gross bearing capacity (GBC). But many users asked for net bearing capacity (NBC) option. As we know, gross bearing is calculated as:
G.B.C = NBC + Soil Overburden
So, to input gross soil bearing capacity user must know soil overburden pressure and add that to NBC to obtain GBC. For a project there may be footings at different depths or variable embedment depths, so for each footing GBC has to be calculated independently which should be avoided to automate foundation design.
This new option automates the process of GBC calculation by calculating soil overburden during design optimization process, hence the bearing capacity needs to be input once for all footings having the same NBC.
Net pressure for concrete check
Net pressure check is more of a necessity than a convenience. Footing plan dimensions are optimized for service load cases only where selfweight is used as a component of service load. But for strength checks selfweight is not required.
In some cases there may be large moment and low axial load resulting in the load centroid acting beyond the footing plan dimensions. In that scenario, stress distribution at different footing corners might not converge and design won’t be possible. So, selfweight can be added to balance that eccentricity. But adding selfweight will yield higher bending moment (BM) and shear force (SF) which in turn will produce an overly conservative design. To solve this dilemma, ‘Net Pressure’ option can be used which will use selfweight to converge a solution and then will deduct the effect of selfweight while calculating design BM and SF. This method is recommended.
The other noteworthy enhancements are sliding check for octagonal footing and addition of shear check for pedestal design which makes pedestal design complete.
Drawing
This version of the program produces a very high quality isolated footing detail drawing. The drawing has 5 viewports and each viewport has its own scale. The drawing looks professional and can be used for production drawing with little effort. A sample drawing is as shown below.
For more details, please refer to the “What’s New” document.