
November 17, 2011
How Do I Assign Drift Snow Loads to the Roof in RISAFloor?
RISAFloor has the ability to apply tapered snow loads on your building’s roof to simulate drift snow loads.
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…
Read More
RISAFloor has the ability to apply tapered snow loads on your building’s roof to simulate drift snow loads.
RISAFloor uses the Area Load Definitions spreadsheet to define area loads available for use on a floor.
One of the most overlooked design criteria for commercial buildings is the tendency of the floor system to bounce or vibrate due to human footfalls. Excessive vibration of the floor system is a serviceability issue, and can lead to annoyance or concern from the building’s occupants.
RISAFloor has the ability to model column splices for all columns. You have the choice of a Moment or Shear splice depending upon what type of forces you want the splice to transfer. There are a few different ways to define your splices that give you flexibility in assigning them to your columns.
The latest version of RISASection, includes a powerful new DXF import feature. This feature allows the user to import any 2D geometry into RISASection for the calculation of the cross-sectional properties and the import into RISA-2D, RISA-3D or RISAFloor for use in the larger model.
There are several ways to take your RISA-3D or RISAFloor model to RISAConnection. The RISA-3D and RISAFloor end reactions can be sent directly to RISAConnection or RISAConnection can be operated from within RISAFloor and RISA-3D.
Steel connections can be designed from within RISA-3D using the integration with RISAConnection. Before you start your connection design, you’ll need to define the type of connection and assign the connections to the beams. Just follow these steps in the RISA-3D model:
RISA-3D, RISA-2D and RISAFloor have the capability to project distributed and area loads onto members. Consider the case of snow load on two buildings: one with a flat roof and one with a sloped roof. Ignoring the concept of shedding, if both buildings have the same footprint then they should both...
Column boundary conditions are set in RISAFloor per the Splice Type that you have set in the Columns spreadsheet. For any column at the lowest floor level, the Splice checkbox will automatically be checked, indicating that a boundary condition will be set at the base. You may set the boundary...
Our monthly "Structural Moment" newsletter is the best way to keep up with RISA’s product updates, new releases, new features, training events, webinars and more...