A few questions:
1. Is the only way to account for the lateral stiffness of a steel roof deck or checkered plate floor by modelling plate elements and assigning a stiffness, or can the MASTER/SLAVE ZX command be used?
2. I am modeling an existing building in which the floor structure is made up of wood pack flooring sitting on top of deep steel beams. Is the MASTER/SLAVE ZX command accurate in this situation or would I need to model plate elements?
3. Is there a different way to use joists in a Staad model where they will actually be representative of more than their own self weight? I am also modeling a warehouse structure where the designer would like to use long span joists at 5' o/c in one direction(120'). I have only modeled the joists at the column lines(25' o/c) where they will have a bottom chord brace back to the column. When I run my model with lateral load, the joists provide no stiffness and my deflections are more than unrealistic. To fix this I put in very heavy W shapes and make sure to exclude the self weight. This brings the deflections back into a reasonable range, but would like to think there is a more accurate way to do this. Any suggestions?
Suggestions would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Kyle