
January 3, 2019
What wood wall design method should I use?
RISA-3D is one of the few pieces of software on the market offering wood shear wall analysis and design accompanied by multiple design methods to best suit your detailing needs.
If you've ever wondered what it’s like to be an industrial structural engineer, let me paint you a picture: Imagine juggling a dozen problems at once—steel frames, conveyor supports, pipe racks, tank foundations—all while trying to decipher a set of drawings that look like they were faxed from 1997. And, of course, every single solution is needed yesterday. But don’t worry! With the right tools (cough RISA and ADAPT cough), navigating this daily chaos becomes a lot more manageable. So, grab your coffee (black, obviously), and let’s walk through a typical day. 6:30 AM: Morning Coffee & Evaluating Additional Loads The first email of the day: “Can we add another 10,000 lbs of equipment to the mezzanine? What about seismic drift and vibration?” Instead of a lengthy hand calculation, you fire up RISAFloor and check gravity load distribution. Exporting to RISA-3D, you analyze modal frequencies and check if the additional weight will push the structure into an uncomfortable range for human occupancy. Seismic drift is next. A quick response spectrum analysis in RISA-3D confirms that the drift is still within acceptable limits. You send your report with confidence—no major framing changes required. 9:00 AM: Field Issue - Pipe Rack Base…
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RISA-3D is one of the few pieces of software on the market offering wood shear wall analysis and design accompanied by multiple design methods to best suit your detailing needs.
Applying a Custom Rebar Layout in RISA-3D: To begin creating a custom rebar layout, simply click the Custom Rebar Layout button located in the Advanced tab of the ribbon toolbar.
Modeling tapered gusset plates in RISAConnection is now easier than ever. With the recent addition of the Custom Angle input, you may now enter an angle to quickly cut back a gusset edge.
The base material at the location of a weld may have less strength than the weld itself. In this case it will control the overall strength of the welded connection. In order to account for this, RISAConnection uses a weld strength reduction factor (α) which we call the Base Material Proration...
Wide Flange beam to HSS Tube column moment connections can now be designed in RISAConnection version 9 with both the US and Canadian design standards. HSS tubes may be selected as the supporting column member on either of the two moment connections:
RISAConnection assumes by default that your vertical brace connection is a one-sided connection without any outside influence or load transfer from other connected elements. Using this assumption, the design shear and axial force at the beam to column sub-connection is determined using simple...
Wide Flange Beam to HSS Tube Column Moment Connections can now be designed in RISAConnection version 9. HSS tubes may be selected as the supporting column member on either of the two moment connections:
RISAFoundation v11.0 includes two new tabs in the Safety Factors results spreadsheet that breakdown the slab’s stabilizing and destabilizing forces for each category. The new Overturn/Resist by Category and Sliding/Resist by Category tabs make it easy to understand how the program calculates the...
In RISA-3D, the current method of design for masonry lintels is Simply Supported where the masonry lintels are idealized into a simply supported pin-pin beam configuration. Now, masonry lintels can instead be analyzed using finite element analysis. With this method, the lintel will be fully...
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