So I modeled some project and I was curious to get things done faster by trying RCDC rather than just relying on STAAD for analysis and designing manually (By the way, is there anyone else other than my senior who strictly states that STAAD concrete design is incorrect, only good for analysis?). I watched the Bentley institute training and started off to find a few frustrating surprises:
Firstly, my model had the basement wall modeled as plates, so upon starting a beam design for the ground level the beams that are supposed to rest on the wall (plates) are not supported. This might explain why the shear walls were modeled as beams in the online learning path. But I'm not a fan of the "getting around it" approach by modelling a wall with the beam tool then play around with specs...etc. Not to mention that I have soil pressure assigned to these plates, such /m2 loads are ofcourse not applicable to beams.
Secondly, when starting slab design for the ground level, for the same reason of not detecting the basement wall, the slabs that are supported by the wall do not exist. and adding a slab function in RCDC seems to only add a slab to the table, not to the view.
Thirdly, I have some curve shaped column in my project to align with a circular part of the building. So instead of modeling with the beam tool I modeled it with vertical plates. Again, the problem is with the column design in RCDC which will not detect such vertical plates as a support to beams (that are now seen as cantilever) and no slab is seen at all.
Lastly, there's the problem of having some dummy members in my model for the purpose of having the weight of the block wall on the plates this sometimes causes unwanted export results, and sometimes beam continuity check to fail (wish I can apply line load on plates someday). I'm aware I can melt the wall weight to spread over the slab area but it will just bloat the list of dead loads for slabs with different areas.
For a moment I thought I can convince my manually driven senior to get things done faster by using RCDC knowing that it provides detailed calculation report that cannot be invalidated as unsafe, but I'm glad I didn't introduce the solution before hearing from the pros the official approach to get around solve the above. I'm tired of being boss chased to the submittal deadline because my senior does not believe in STAAD for designing
File attached. Any off-topic comments on the model are also welcome. Let me know if I'm missing/misusing anything, or if the model can be made more efficient and optimized.
Your help is very much appreciated. This will be a great reference for people experiencing the same.
(Please visit the site to view this file)