My preference for design is to use general purpose FEA software for the analysis, and custom spreadsheets for the design.
Just about every major design related structural problem I can think of has been due to someone making a basic incorrect assumption or over-simplification, and that is exactly the sort of thing that is likely to be missed in going through detailed calculations step by step, and likely to be picked up in a fully independent analysis and review. I can't see anything unwise or unethical about it, quite the reverse. This may not be wise, or even ethical, but that's what I'm doing presently. RE: Structural Engineering Software Programs r13 (Civil/Environmental) 4 Sep 20 21:49 Companies were acting like the sky was going to fall down if the year printed on their structural calculation said 19100 instead of 2000. The thing that really annoyed me was the Y2K stuff.
Software companies are trying to get rid of terms like "whitelist / blacklist" as well. I don't like this one quite as much, because I don't think it's quite as clear. Master joints for diaphragms (or slaved/constrained joints) become primary or main joints instead. That makes plenty of sense to me, both terms are easy to understand. Slaved Degrees of freedom are now often referred to as Constrained degrees of freedom. Usually by some large / bureaucratic organization that needs to check off some boxes on some initiative they're doing. That being said, it is definitely true that the big software companies are often contacted about removing such language and terminology from their software. I'm not sure that anyone who's using structural engineering software is really looking at these terms and thinking they cause division or drive racial inequality. Whitebox vs Blackbox?! Shame on you for using racially charged language in your proposed software ideas. RE: Structural Engineering Software Programs RWW0002 (Structural) 4 Sep 20 18:04 Check the software that's easy to check and then check that against your 3D FEM black bock stuff. Additionally, Whitebox would be the one geared towards its users having a high level of comfort in its output. In a reliability sense, it is altogether reasonable to believe that two pieces of software could be used to cross check, particularly if the packages are set up very differently. Folks will object to using one piece of software to check another but, done properly I think that it would be legit. Given that I mean for the price to be somewhere in the $5 - $20 per month range, it's occured to me that some may see value in using Whitebox to check higher end software packages.
Nobody, including nature, really believes in discontinuities for the most part.ĥ) Management's willingness to run your verification examples if desired. It would be non-FEM software, akin to hand calcs on steroids, and made as transparent as possible, including:ģ) Graphs of things that would facilitate the checking of reasonableness. The idea being that Whitebox shall be the opposite of black-box. With respect to my potential software development project, "KootWare" would be commercially coined "Whitebox" as suggested to me by Lomarandil. RE: Structural Engineering Software Programs KootK (Structural) 3 Sep 20 15:45 If you're looking mostly for ease of use then maybe RISA (though IMO it's not as easy to use as it used to be). non-linear then you're probably talking SAP2000. If you're looking for more advance analysis (i.e. I'll toss out a few names that are popular here in the USA.Ĭaveat: I used to work for RISA and I now work for CSI (the company that makes SAP2000 and ETABS). assuming that you're already a member of that community. If you're looking for the "standard in the structural engineering community" then you should already have a pretty good idea.
If you're talking static analysis, then "latest theories" may just mean the most recent code requirements. Are you talking dynamics, non-linear hinging, or what. "the latest theories", what does that mean. I need a software that continually updates to include the latest theories, and possibly is the standard in the structural engineering industry.