I am excited to announce the latest new release of the STAAD.Pro V8i SELECTseries 4 QA&R has been published on the Bentley SELECT server and is now available for download.
The new release has undergone not only the stringent quality assurance programme that all STAAD.Pro releases go through, but also additional QA processes required for applications that are to be used on nuclear projects, notably the specific 10CFR21 reporting requirements*. This has resulted in a large number of updates/fixes reported in the Revision History documentation. Additionally we have added 2 new features that all users can take advantage of.
Enhanced ABS/SRSS Combination Results
The nature of ABS and SRSS methodology means that only a single value is returned from these forms of load combination, i.e. always positive. However, although a single value this can represent an envelope of results from a maximum negative to maximum positive. Also, consider forces on a member, these have six degrees of freedom at each end. Each degree of freedom can be either positive or negative, resulting in 64 various permutations of result for a single combination.
The current LOAD COMBINATION command is enhanced with a GENERATE option to activate creation of the 64 permutations. As an SRSS combination can include algebraic parts, the output file indicates the envelope covered by these and ABS showing the maximum and minimum values. Currently code checking for AISC 360-10 and ASME NF codes will take advantage of the results from the 64 permutations; other codes will behave as before.
Connection Tags
This new feature allows ends of members to be given reference tags to represent a connection type. These tags will be transferred with the model into an ISM repository allowing any detailing application that pulls the model from the ISM repository to detail an appropriate connection.
An XML template is provided to allow the capacities of connections for given column/beam combinations to be quickly checked against the analysis results.
Also where specific connection types are associated with releases (e.g. a shear connection having MZ release), the release can be assigned at the same time as the connection tag.
Other updates and bug fixes.
59 Issues addressed:-
• Issues addressed in the Analysis/Design engine (31)
• Issues addressed in the Pre-Processing Mode (10)
• Issued Addressed in the Post-Processing Mode (01)
• Issues Addressed in the Piping Mode (01)
• Issues Addressed in the Editor, Viewer and other modules (08)
• Issues Addressed with Printing and Documentation (08)
* Contact your Bentley account manager/sales centre if you want to purchase licenses to the STAAD QA&R Programme to get the 10CFR21 QA report documents.
Here is a workaround to edit the User Tools as the menu item is currently not available.
1) Ensure STAAD.Pro is not currently open. If it is, close all copies down.
2) Navigate to the folder:-
C:\Users\(username)\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\ProgramData\Bentley\Engineering\STAAD.Pro V8i SS4
3) Open the INI file StaadPro20070.INI. This is a text file which should be editable ina copy of NotePad.
4) Find the section titled [LOCAL-USER-Tools]. If there is not one in the file, then add it at the bottom of the file.
5) The following line should indicate the number of user items that appear in the list of tools as a count, e.g.
Count=2
6) For each item, there should be four lines of data:-
ItemName#(***)=
Command#(***)=
Arg#(***)=
Dir#(***)=
Where (***) is an integer
ItemName is the text that appears in the GUI
Command is the path to the macro or executable
Arg is any arguments needed to be passed to the macro or executable (optiopnal)
Dir is the folder where the macro or executable is pointed to (optiopnal)
e.g.
ItemName#1=Sample macro
Command#1=D:\STAAD.Pro Macros\Displacement Check\DisplacementCheck.vbs
Arg#1=
Dir#1=
The latest build has seen the introduction of an issue with the Tools menu with 'User Tools' and 'Plugin Tools' such that the items cannot be setup in the GUI, however, I will see if I can suggest a workaround shortly.
Gumpmaster, the issues addressed as aggregrated. Thus each new version is built from the source code of the previous, hence the issues addressed in one build are automatically carried forward into the next.
What happened to "Configure User Tools . . ." in the "Tools" pull-down? It's gone.
Thanks Carlos.
A quick question for you on this. Do all these changes that you identified for the QA&R release get carried over to the next standard release?