Hello everyone,
I am working for one of the underground metro projects where I have to design various slabs. These slabs have to be designed for bending moment, torsion and shear force for large number of load combinations. The practice which I am following is to create a STAAD model and obtain various sectional forces from STAAD for design and doing the design part using customized excel spreadsheet which I have developed.
STAAD provides bending moment contours/ result tables and torsion contours/ result tables separately and doesn’t add as per Wood and Armer method (which we normally follow in practice) for any particular load combination. And yes, STAAD design includes torsion with bending moments in ULS case but I have to do stress check as well as crack width check so it’s not of much use to me. It is very cumbersome process where I have to add absolute value of torsion with bending moment for large number of load cases (Wood and Armer method) which I want to avoid. I wish if someone can suggest a simpler way. Also, is it possible to develop a macro using OpenSTAAD.
Regards,
Ankit Gupta
As Seth mentioned, RAM Concept is Bentley’s Slab Design solution and it would handle all that you mentioned. The added advantage here is that STAAD.Pro is fully integrated with RAM Concept and so it will make life so much easier for you. In other words you can have your structure modeled and analyzed in STAAD.Pro with slabs at different elevations and you can design your frame members ( beams/columns ) in STAAD.Pro and then you can take each slab directly to RAM Concept to get these designed. The slab geometry and the loads from STAAD.Pro model are directly read by RAM Concept. In real life projects with hundreds of load cases, this workflow can really be a game changer.