Is SAP2000 a good program for FEA?

[Diquan]

Some people have told me that for FEA, SAP is not a very good program, what do you think about that?

Thanks!

Diquan

 

[051174]

It depends naturally to the user.it is arguable.
I suppose Concrete Softwares are the best one.

 

[GBor]

I think there are better programs depending on your application and budget.

Garland E. Borowski, PE
Borowski Engineering & Analytical Services, Inc.
Lower Alabama SolidWorks Users Group

 

[dozer]

I wouldn't say it's not a very good program. It really depends on what you want the software to do. If your looking for a general purpose FEA package with lots of different kinds of elements then no, SAP is not the ticket.

For frame analysis I liked it though at the moment I would stay away from it. I don't use it presently but I was using release 9 and the time it took just to display the results (tables of numbers, not graphically) was ridiculous. My friend who still uses it says release 10 is still slow in this area.

What do I define as slow? I was analyzing a structure that had . . . best I recall . . . about 6000 members. It took 3 minutes from the time I hit mouse button until the results popped up on the screen. No, it wasn't just my computer. To me, that's unusable.