December 3, 2024

Customer Spotlight: Facet

Curious how a small firm grew into a powerhouse through smart software choices? Follow Facet's journey from a team of 12 to 136 employees with the power of integrating tools like RISA-3D and ADAPT-Builder. With these solutions, they streamlined workflows, reduced design time, and took on more complex projects. Read the full customer spotlight to learn how Facet used RISA to scale and succeed.

Facet

Tags: RISA, New, News, Customer Spotlight

April 26, 2017 | RISA-3D, New, Steel

Design of CFS Face-to-Face Channels & Tube Shapes now Available

RISA-3D can design the Cold Formed Steel face-to-face channel and track sections. You can also get design of a Cold Formed Steel tube shape in RISA-3D. The Shape Selection dialog will allow you to model the built-up sections by selecting “Face to Face” shown below. There are a variety of different code checks that are done for closed shape sections per the AISI and these are all done automatically for you. There is one new parameter required by RISA, the spacing of the connections between the face-to-face members in order to properly calculate the slenderness (KL/r). This additional spacing input required is listed as “a” in the Members double click dialog or the Member spreadsheet: The Detail Report for Face-to-Face members shows all the controlling section properties including Effective Area, Section Modulus, and Moment of Inertia…

September 11, 2014 | RISA-3D, New

How Do I Create Offset Connections in RISA-3D?

By default RISA-3D draws all members as line elements located at the centroid of the cross-section. However, connections between members are not always aligned with a member’s centroid. There may be horizontal or vertical offsets in the connection. To account for these you can add rigid links to create this eccentricity. More information about rigid links can be found in the following article: Before proceeding with these offsets, ask yourself: Do I need to account for these offsets in my structural model? Will these offsets significantly affect the analysis? In many circumstances the answer to both of these questions is no. In such cases, it is not worth the extra modeling to obtain the minimal change in the analysis results. However, if the eccentricity causes a significant effect to the analysis then you may want to account for the eccentricities. This decision is up to your engineering judgment. For example, below a beam is offset from a column and is supported on a haunch off of the column flange. The approach is simple: Rather than drawing the members connected to one another, draw them in space as they actually are. If there is an offset then these members will not…

October 19, 2016 | RISA-3D, RISAFloor, New, Instability

Instabilities in RISA-3D with Flexible Diaphragms

In a model that contains both RISAFloor and RISA-3D data it is possible to define your diaphragms as either flexible or rigid for lateral design. You can do this from the Diaphragms spreadsheet in either program: Rigid diaphragms will create a rigid link mesh in RISA-3D that makes the diaphragm act as a rigid body. There is a physical effect on your model that affects the analysis by locking all nodes at the diaphragm level together. Flexible diaphragms act solely as a load attribution mechanism. The program calculates the tributary area to the lateral force resisting elements and applies the load to the collectors. However, there is no physical effect on the analysis. The flexible diaphragm behavior can cause lateral stability problems with your model. Here is an example where this could be a problem: In this scenario our braced frames in our flexible diaphragm model have no out-of-plane stability provided, as the diaphragm has no physical effect on the model. When we solve this model we will receive instabilities in the solution. To handle this scenario we will use very small spring boundary conditions in the out-of-plane directions on the frames. These are dummy boundary conditions of course. Because…