Dear All,
I am working on STAAD and need answers to some questions. Will be grateful if you could help me out with these. I am very new to this software
1. Floor Diaphragm: Is master slave better or the method where we increase the Iy of beam to a high value? I don't know how to apply master slave. Can anyone help me with steps?
[Or should I model the entire slab with plate elements? In that case floor diaphragm will be automatically taken care of?]
2. Cantilever: I have to apply vertical earthquake load on a 15m cantilevered plate girder. How do I apply this? If I run staad then normal Fx and Fz is fine but I need a method to apply vertical earthquake in staad for this cantilever. How do I calculate lumped mass in the software for this?
3. Shear Wall: I have two identical models except for one difference that one is modeled with plates as shear walls and other one is modeled with surface elements as shear walls. question with this in mind are written in a, b, c below
a. Do I need to mesh surface elements and/or plate elements if I intend to only analyze the plates/surface elements and read-off the vertical stresses only for manual design of the same?
b. In both of these models I have not modeled any slab. So I have situations where slabs areas are bound by vertical edges of shear wall and hence the software is not taking "Floor Load" command. How to sort this out?
c.I read somewhere that surface elements are better to model shear walls. But if I intend to only extract forces and design by hand, is it fine to use any of these? Or does surface element have any distinct and un-ignorable advantage over plate elements for shear wall modeling?
Many Thanks,
Abhishek