RISA | Tips & Tricks | Concrete (4)

May 22, 2025

How RISA Powers Manufacturing Facility Design from Top to Bottom

Case Study: Designing for Strength at Every Level When a Midwest engineering firm was tasked with designing a 120,000-square-foot manufacturing facility, they knew the challenge wasn’t just about steel and concrete—it was about integration. The structure needed to support overhead cranes, custom conveyor systems, rooftop equipment, and a range of vibration-sensitive machinery. On top of that, the site’s soil profile required deep foundations and a mat slab in high-load zones. Instead of managing this complex design puzzle across multiple platforms, the firm turned to the full RISA Suite—using RISA-3D, RISAFloor, and RISAFoundation in tandem. The result? A seamless, accurate, and time-saving design process that allowed the firm to deliver ahead of schedule. Steel Superstructures Made Simple With RISA-3D, the team quickly modeled the facility’s steel framing system, including built-up columns, multi-bay trusses, and lateral bracing. Loads from the cranes, roof units, and custom mezzanines were easily applied using RISA’s versatile load generator and load combination tools. Key wins: Modeled the entire lateral and gravity system in a single file Ran multiple load scenarios including seismic, crane surge, and equipment-induced vibration Used RISA’s code checks to validate steel member sizing under heavy, variable loads Floor System Integration with RISAFloor With steel…

November 16, 2016

Custom Column Strip Widths

RISAFloor v11 now includes the ability to create custom column strip widths in order to optimize the design of slab reinforcement.

March 3, 2016

How to Thicken a Slab

RISAFloor ES allows you to model concrete slabs of any thickness. However, there might be sections of the building that require a thicker slab. The icon is shown below and it will allow you to draw a Polygon or Rectangular shape.

February 4, 2016

How to Add a Drop Panel

In RISAFloor ES, you can quickly thicken the slab in the column strip area with the Drop Panel tool. The column strip is typically the area of highest demand so increasing the thickness may help optimize the concrete usage.

December 16, 2015

Concrete Design per ACI 318-14 Concrete Code now Available

The new ACI 318-14 code has been implemented into RISA-3D v14, RISAFloor v10, and RISAFoundation v8.

November 19, 2015

Battered Retaining Wall Design

The batter dimensions can be set from Wall Footing Definitions:

November 3, 2015

How to Investigate the Design Strip Results in RISAFoundation

In RISAFoundation, Design Strips are used to create regions in a slab for reinforcement design. Design strip size and shape is determined by the user, see the Help- Slab- Design Strip Width topic.

August 8, 2015

How do you add Shear Caps to columns?

Per the ACI, you can add a Shear Cap to your column to increase the shear strength of the slab. In RISAFloor ES two-way slabs, adding a shear cap will thicken the plates around the column automatically. The Shear Cap will affect the Punching Shear and the One-Way shear calculations. As you draw the...

March 10, 2015

What is a Semi-Rigid Diaphragm?

RISAFloor Concrete Floor Slabs can design be transferred into RISA-3D for lateral design using either a Rigid Diaphragm or Semi-Rigid diaphragm. In RISA-3D, the wind and seismic loads are calculated and then applied into the diaphragm level to distribute the forces to the Lateral Resisting System.

October 21, 2014

How are Cantilevered Slabs designed?

Concrete buildings often have large cantilevers. In RISAFloor ES, the Support lines can be drawn to support points but also they can be drawn as cantilevers (shown below).

Tips & Tricks