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Using Mathcad to calculate IBC Load Combinations

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dylansdad

Structural
Nov 15, 2005
134
From time to time I am faced with the task of designing foundations for PEMB. Most of the time there are few wind/snow/E primary loads and combining these into Load Combinations is time consuming, but I manage to get through it. However now I am faced with a project that has over 10! primary snow loads and 18! primary wind loads. I am by no means a Mathcad whiz, but there has got to be a way to put these primary loads and create load combinations by using Mathcad. I have searched the Structural Engineering forum along with the Mathcad forum and could find no specific threads pertaining to this.
I attempted (Mathcad15) to put the primary dead loads (DL), roof live (RL), wind (WIND),seismic (E), and snow (SNOW)into vectors and calculate the combinations. P denotes vertical loading and V denotes horizontal loading. I was expecting errors because the number of columns in each vector are not the same. Has anyone tried this in Mathcad? I would appreciate any advice. Thanks.
 
 http://files.engineering.com/getfile.aspx?folder=f1159be8-8761-420d-98aa-a7520b8827f2&file=load_combination.xmcd
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Can't you just re-declare those arrays that do not have enough members and fill the empty spots with "NaN" to make them all the same and sort that out later?
 
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