Snow Load Calculator
Snow Load Calculator
3
medeek (Structural)
(OP)
Finally finished up the snow load calculator. Moved it to this page:
http://design.medeek.com/resources/snow/snow_calculator.pl
Give it a whirl and let me know what you think.
I wish there was an easy way to calculate the ground snow loads for a given location but unfortunately there is not.
http://design.medeek.com/resources/snow/snow_calculator.pl
Give it a whirl and let me know what you think.
I wish there was an easy way to calculate the ground snow loads for a given location but unfortunately there is not.
RE: Snow Load Calculator
Best to you,
Goober Dave
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RE: Snow Load Calculator
http://design.medeek.com/resources/snow/utahground...
RE: Snow Load Calculator
http://design.medeek.com/resources/snow/montanagroundsnowloads.html
RE: Snow Load Calculator
http://design.medeek.com/resources/snow/newyorkgro...
My map of the ASCE 7-10 ground snow loads is still unfinished, not because I cannot finish it but because I am currently waiting on a response back from the ASCE licensing division about the reproduction of the data presented in Fig. 7-1 (ground snow load map). Reproducing or displaying a scanned version of the map seems to be less of a concern that creating an accurate electronic version of the map that is much more useful to the general public and engineering community.
I am summarizing each States snow load requirements on this page:
http://design.medeek.com/resources/snow/statesnowl...
As you can see I've only just started. Some states such as Colorado let the local jurisdictions (City and County) set their own snow load requirements so creating a map for the entire state is more difficult but not necessarily impossible. Some states such as Oregon have developed much more sophisticated online systems, I applaud their efforts.
RE: Snow Load Calculator
RE: Snow Load Calculator
The advantage to using this tool is that you don't need to know the lat. and long. off hand, just click on the map and it does the rest.
http://design.medeek.com/resources/s...snowloads.h...
Also added in "tile" surface to the calculator per request from a southern California resident, not that they get much snow down there.
RE: Snow Load Calculator
http://design.medeek.com/resources/snow/groundsnow...
Digitizing it, so that it was accurate, took far longer than I had planned on but once I was underway I wasn't about to stop.
Note how most of the western US requires case studies, hence many of these states have their own snow load maps and research to back them up.
RE: Snow Load Calculator
The only problem is google maps implementation of the KML layer does not allow this transmittal of information. So I basically banged my head against the wall for almost 2 weeks trying to do the impossible. However, I was not ready to throw in the towel just yet. Since the KML data is just plain text, (coordinates) I thought there must be some way to analyze this data and determine if a given location is within a certain polygon and if it is then be able to assign that polygon description (ASCE snow load details) to a variable which is then delivered to the client. Turns out this is called the point in the polygon problem and it is well documented:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_in_polygon
So I was about to write an algorithm for ray casting which would have taken some time. Then I thought maybe someone else has done this before and sure enough I found a couple of good perl modules that handled this nicely and I narrowly avoided reinventing the wheel. Just a few lines of Perl later and I had managed to create a nice little API for the ASCE ground snow load data:
http://design.medeek.com/resources/medeekapi.html
RE: Snow Load Calculator
RE: Snow Load Calculator
[url=http://design.medeek.com/resources/snow/wisconsinr...]http://design.medeek.com/resources/snow/wisconsinr...[/url]
Note that this is not the ground snow load but the minimum roof design snow load. Wisconsin does things a little differently when it comes to residential design and has their own code (UDC) versus the more widely adopted IRC.
RE: Snow Load Calculator
http://design.medeek.com/resources/snow/michigangroundsnowloads.html
This zone map is essentially an approximation of the ASCE snow load map with isolines fitted to county and township boundaries.
I'm not entirely satisfied with the appearance of this map since the county lines make the map appear too busy.
RE: Snow Load Calculator
http://design.medeek.com/resources/snow/vermontgroundsnowloads.html
This zone map defines ground snow loads by township and city boundaries and is derived from the zone map on page 48 of the 2012 Vermont Fire & Building Safety Code.
Vermont is a small state so the KML for this map was relatively easy to create.
RE: Snow Load Calculator
Idaho Ground Snow Loads
into KML paths (isolines). The tricky part will be programming the algorithm that can interpolate between isolines. The basis for this algorithm is my previous study shown below.
The interpolation is further complicated with peaks, valleys, ridges and saddle points. In order to deal with these degenerate cases will require the addition of some virtual isolines to provide additional data points to the algorithm.
When I am finished the user should be able to click on the site location on the map and get an accurate NGSL which then automatically multiplied by the site elevation will give the ground snow load for that location.
RE: Snow Load Calculator
RE: Snow Load Calculator
V = (V2h2 + V1h2)/(h1 + h2)
For the interpolation at the peaks and valleys I've decided to use a non-linear method to better approximate what I would expect in reality. This equation I've derived as:
V = (6V2h2 + .5V1h22)/(6h1 + .5h22)
RE: Snow Load Calculator
RE: Snow Load Calculator
Idaho Ground Snow Loads
RE: Snow Load Calculator
http://design.medeek.com/resources/snow/snow_calcu...
It was a real pain to format this document from HTML to PDF. However, I will probably do the same PDF report format for the wind, seismic and ground snow load maps as I get time.
RE: Snow Load Calculator
http://design.medeek.com/resources/snow/groundsnow...