I have searched the pdf manual, the forums, and the communities and not found anything about composite beams in Elements. Will it not allow design of a beam acting compositely with a concrete slab via shear studs or composite deck?
Regretfully, RAM Elements does not design composite beams. However, you could select the beam and export to RAM SBeam from RAM Elements by clicking on the RE button in upper left corner of the program window, clicking on Export, and then choosing RAM SBeam.
Hmmm, I don't think that will help. We have a large cantilevered L-shaped stair we've been asked to design that starts on an elevated composite slab and attaches to the 3rd floor composite slab with no support under the landing. The torsion is causing very large deflections at the intermediate landing unless we can fix both ends of the stair. My boss asked me to model in the surrounding bay to see the effect of deflection of the floor framing on the overall stiffness of the stair structure. I'm thinking a 1 beam at time design wouldn't help if I'm needing to see the system deflection.
No, RAM SBeam would not be a good program to use for this. You could try including the slab as concrete shells. However, these shells are assumed to act at the centroid of the beam and have flexural stiffness in both directions (no one-way shells). Again, there is not a feature in RAM Elements that will design steel beams as composite members.