Structural Design Program
Structural Design Program
(OP)
I am relatively new to the structural design industry, however my company is looking to purchase a design program to aide and expedite the process. All the work done now is completely by hand with drawings created in Autocad. The difficulty of the calculations vary, and it is almost entirely steel design, with a sub-catergory for rigging and reaving. I have experience with GTStrudl (went to GT) and have seen Risa 3d, SAP2000 and Midas but have limited to zero working knowledge of them. I assume these are all reasonably compatible with Autodesk, but I am looking for reviews and advice regarding available design systems. I have also researched Scia but have found useful information regarding the system hard to come by.
thank you all for your help it is greatly appreciated.
thank you all for your help it is greatly appreciated.






RE: Structural Design Program
I have always used STAAD...not many here seem to like it however.
RE: Structural Design Program
SAP is very good but it may be overkill depending on what you need. You can do almost anything in SAP but for that reason it is a little cumbersome if you are trying to do something very basic. Etabs is basically SAP but with a focus on building structures, it has a lot of useful additions to sap that make doing buildings really easy - it's not so great for non-building structures though.
Risa a good all around program and cheap compared to sap. For buildings it doesn't match up with Etabs but it's good enough most of the time and it's very user friendly. It's great for doing small stuff - a simple truss, small frames etc.
One thing to note is that the above (and a lot of others) are analysis programs that also handle member design. They do not however handle design of connections, base plate, footings etc etc. I don't know if you need that or not. You can make a lot of that yourself with spreadsheets.
You can download a free trial of RISA that is only limited by model size. Maybe give that a try for a while. There are also loads of other programs out there.
RE: Structural Design Program
I`m a fan of RAM elements for the random stuff that comes up around the office.
RE: Structural Design Program
RE: Structural Design Program
Thanks again, I hope this helps clear some things up.
RE: Structural Design Program
You will be without connection design.
RE: Structural Design Program
You can buy other connection programs
RE: Structural Design Program
RE: Structural Design Program
RE: Structural Design Program
STAAD is a little clunky but I like it for noodles. My biggest complaint is that it is set up with the Y axis as vertical. Thats as bad as flipping the moment diagram upside down!
RE: Structural Design Program
Mike McCann
MMC Engineering
RE: Structural Design Program
RE: Structural Design Program
http://www.FerrellEngineering.com
RE: Structural Design Program
RE: Structural Design Program
RE: Structural Design Program
RE: Structural Design Program
If you are working by hand, have your methods and know how, Mathcad allows you to set up templates to be used over and over and over...and over... Very intuitive and it follows your hand calc's.
You will need to supplement it occasionally with something like Risa and some specialty programs, for say things like retaining walls, and concrete columns, but otherwise Mathcad is it.
I strongly recommend Mathcad for structural engineering. It's just more all purpose, versatile, and transparent than the "structural" programs.
Disclaimer: I no longer do engineering design and do not have Matchcad installed.
RE: Structural Design Program
RE: Structural Design Program
Just make sure you are familiar with the software as it ignores some of the Lb and K values making your desing inadequate.
BTW, Just completed a stacker model in RISA3D, very neat.
RE: Structural Design Program
RE: Structural Design Program
RE: Structural Design Program
RE: Structural Design Program
STAAD is almost embarrassingly bad.
My other gripe is, STAAD doesn't always show the details of the design check.
For instance, STAAD will design double angle compression members and take into consideration LTB, but no where on the on output does it show it.
Same thing goes for compression members designed according to appendix B in the 1989 code.
RE: Structural Design Program
RE: Structural Design Program
RE: Structural Design Program
RE: Structural Design Program
Never had a problem importing DXF files into risa. If you assign layers in AutoCAD with the HR_ prefix in the beginning it will transfer that information into Risa as a Hot Rolled section set and all you have to do is to assign proper member sizes.
Make sure that you round off joint coordinates and then perform a model merge. It works very efficently for me.
One thing with Risa is, like I said before, after importing files from AutoCAD you need to check Lb and K values for members, they tend to get wacky sometimes.
One more good thing about Risa is the support. There is plethora of webinars on their website that show you how to do things, some of them are free and some are payed, but some payed ones even count for continuing education credits for PE.
For me risa is far better than SAP. The only other program I could suggest is Dr. Frame, but I have very limited exposure to the program so I am of no help.
RE: Structural Design Program
I also now have CASA 3D on the iOS platform, which seems to work similarly. I cannot speak about ease of use since I have not mastered it just yet.
RE: Structural Design Program
RE: Structural Design Program
RE: Structural Design Program
RE: Structural Design Program
RE: Structural Design Program
I haven't used any of the other programs in a very long time. They could be better now. I think if you are going to do a lot of Floor framing it might be better with RAM.
RAM has a really good separate base plate program I use.
John Southard, M.S., P.E.
http://www.pdhlibrary.com
RE: Structural Design Program
southard - you still have to break up members to get little p-delta in the newest version of Risa but this is still true of most programs.