I have a shear wall that is made up of 3 wall elements along its length and when the software calculates C limit it uses only the shortest wall segment at the end of the wall rather than the full wall length.
Why doesn't the software use 13' as the wall length when checking C limit rather than 50'?
Still looking for an answer on this question
For most purposes, when a wall design group is a single plane we treat it as a unit. We do this because there are several reasons why a wall might need to be segmented, but that does not change its nature. The wall is still a continuous unit resisting some total axial load and moment. When it come to boundary design we still evaluate the longer wall. The exception to this is for in-plane shear design where each segments is evaluated separately.
If you want to force the program to evaluate the smaller segments individually the only option is to assign each a different wall design group.
The problem is not that I want the wall to be evaluated for the smaller segment, I want the wall to be evaluated for the full length in the design group and RAM is not doing that. RAM is looking at the smallest end element length when calculating the C limit value and the results are showing that the compression zone in the special reinforced wall exceeds the C limit value and is requiring a boundary element. If the C limit value was calculated based on the full length of the wall design group then the C limit value would be larger than the compression zone and a boundary element would not be required in the wall.
I think I see what you are saying. The dialog lists lw and the lw values listed are for the full length, but the lw used in calculating c_limit is not this lw, it's the smaller segment lw. My test confirms this. I'm still double checking some values and seeing if there is a simple work-around.
Any update on this issue?