I am working on regular steel structure design via using STAAD to check member deflection. DFF, DJ1 and DJ2 were well applied to define the deflection requirement and beam length, I am sure STAAD had checked the beam deflection in the code checking.
The problem I have is STAAD only provide local deflection check (beam length / local deflection) instead of expected global deflection check (beam length / global deflection) in the output file. I can only find the value of global deflection in the window when double click the target member. It will be much trouble if I want to check global deflection of numerous members in an automatic way.
In instance of secondary beam connecting with main beam, when mostly heavy load acted on secondary beam, the global deflection check for main beam must be the one we need.
Can somebody answer to my query and advise how I can get the output result of global deflection check?
Thanks.
The code I was using is Russian, is that the reason to the problem existed?
For checking beam deflections, you should be using the local deflection as opposed to the global deflection ( except for cantilevers where one can set the CAN parameter to 1). The following FAQ items contain detailed explanation on the deflection checks performed in STAAD
communities.bentley.com/.../10724.american-steel-code-aisc-faq.aspx
If you are interested in finding out global displacements at the various nodes, you can get that from the node displacement tables but these are not used for member defection checks in steel design.
Also one can print story drift as explained in the next FAQ item
Finally one can check the global deflections at various section locations within the members by either double clicking on the member and choosing Global Deflection option from within the Deflection tab of the Member query dialog box or by using the PRINT SECTION DISPLACEMENT LIST … command that prints out the intermediate section displacements in terms of global displacements from the initial position. However these should not be used for beam deflection checks and is not used by the software in checking deflections.