Bentley OpenBridge Designer

[PAK_ENG]

Hello. I was wondering if anyone can give me some feedback on Bentley OpenBridge Designer as a tool for bridge design. We are currently using RC Pier for substructures, CONSPAN for prestressed beams, MERLIN DASH for steel girders, and DESCUS for curved steel girders.

How do you think OpenBridge Designer compares? Does it do FEA? Any big negatives to the software? Since it is a bit pricey, would it be feasible to replace our Merlin Dash and DESCUS licences with OpenBridge Designer?

Thanks for the help!

 

[OSUCivlEng]

We switched to LEAP Bridge Concrete sometime after Bentley bought and integrated LEAP into the fold. Now Bentley has discontinued support for LEAP Bridge and moved it into OpenBridge Designer.

OpenBridge is essentially 3 programs: LEAP Bridge Steel, LEAP Bridge Concrete and something called RM Bridge. LEAP Bridge Concrete essentially runs on its own inside OpenBridge. I can't tell any difference than when it was a standalone program. If you are used to using RC Pier and CONSPAN then you should be pretty comfortable in the LEAP Bridge module in OpenBridge, there's really no difference from RC Pier and CONSPAN.

I can't comment on the steel design part as I've never used it. I may be forced to if MDX doesn't pick up the slack.

I've never used RM Bridge either.

 

[MIKE_311]

We use it, the big issue for us is Bentley bundled Leap Steel and Leap concrete together and doubled the price and now both programs are tied up by a single license. They also threw in RM bridge has limited usefulness for cookie cutter bridges.

It's a bit clunky to run these as standalone now as they are all sort of integrated together, but not really that well. Once you get past that increased cost and figure out how to actually open or create a file. Its the same interface you are used to with RC pier and Conspan.

 

[PAK_ENG]

Thank you for the replies! How do you think it compares to LARSA and also to MerlinDash/DESCUS for steel superstructures? Thanks!

 

[Guest090822]

MerlinDash is great for straight bridges. DESCUS is terrible. A lot of consultants use MDX, but that program is riddled with errors so you really need to stay on top of it with spot-checks.

 

[MIKE_311]

Leap steel works OK. Its gotten better.

It's pretty easy and intuitive to build a bridge model for analysis. It's a bridge modeler GUI that runs the analysis in Staad, grabs the output and runs design checks.

The design checks are comprehensive but a bit overwhelming. It would be nice to get a nice concise summary of the design without having to sift to 100s of pages of output.