Applies To
	Product(s):	STAAD.Pro
	Version(s):	All
	Environment:	N/A
	Area:	Analysis Solutions
	Subarea:	Miscellaneous Analysis Solutions
	Original Author:	Bentley Technical Support Group

I get a warning message during analysis saying *WARNING- APPLIED SELFWEIGHT IS MORE THAN TOTAL WEIGHT OF ALL STRUCTURAL ELEMENTS IN LOAD CASE    113 ALONG Z. What does this mean?

First a bit of a background as to why this message was introduced and then the reason for the message. STAAD now support a LIST assignment for selfweight command which it did not in earlier versions. After this was introduced, it was found that many times selfweight was not being assigned to all members by users or sometimes selfweight for few members were being accounted for multiple times due to erroneous assignment on part of the user. A check was therefore introduced in STAAD to warn the user of such scenarios. So what the software does is,

a. It finds out the total selfweight ( UNFACTORED ) of the structure ( say X )
b. It finds out all instances of selfweight command used in each case and checks the associated LIST of members and adds these weights up for each member to arrive at a value of selfweight (UNFACTORED) for each case ( say Y ). While doing this, it ignores any factor applied to the selfweight.

For example, let us consider the following example load cases

LOAD 1 
SELFWEIGHT Y -1 
…

LOAD 6
SELFWEIGHT Z -2.015
…

LOAD 10
SELFWEIGHT Z -1
…

LOAD 113 
REPEAT LOAD
1 1.603 6 1.5 10 0.003
…

The load case 6 and 10 both has selfweight assigned to all members in Z.

So when it comes to load case 113, the software checks and finds that selfweight command has been applied in Z direction to all members as part of load case 6 ( it ignores the factor 2.015 ) and then the selfweight has been applied in Z direction to all members as part of load case 10. It ignores the 1.5 and 0.003 factors applied to the selfweight as part of the REPEAT LOAD. Hence for load case 113, the total unfactored selfweight is applied twice to all members and so the Y comes out to be more ( twice in this case) than X. Whenever Y does not match X, the software flags these as warnings.

Now it does NOT mean that there is an error in the analysis. It is just that the software is trying to make the user aware of the scenario by providing these warnings. For this case, one may simply ignore these warnings.