Looking for a good prestressed concrete design software

[william_song]

Hi folks,
Newbie in the prestressed/precast industry here.
I am looking for good software on prestressed/precast member design. I am familiar with presto and Erikson Beam. The problem is, they require the user to input the load manually through their GUI. I am designing a Inverted Tee Beam today and my beam has 6 DTs bearing on one side and 5 DTs bearing on the other side. That's a total of 11x2=22 stems! And for each stem, I have 4 basic loads(dead, live, superimposed dead, snow). Punching those 22x4=88 numbers into the software is making me headache. Do we have software in the industry that allows me to input from a text file or a spreadsheet and simply run the engine and export the result?
Any information would be appreciated!
Thanks

 

[KootK]

Concise Beam is excellent but it will also require you to enter the loads manually. I don't know of a software package that will do what you want, however:

1) I've not played with Tekla yet so it might and;

2) I suppose that one might be able to massage SAFE or RAM Concept into doing something like that. Neither package is geared towards prestressed concrete, however, so I'd guess that there would be a lot of fiddling required to get those packages to work with simple span members and deal with things like lifting stresses etc.

What I'd love to see is a package like Concise Beam adding the capability to import loads from spreadsheet input. Then one could build a model in RISA or ETABS and transfer the loads over cut and past style.

 

[Brad805]

Tekla does not do that out of the box. They have a very useful link with Idea Statica, but Idea Statica does not yet have an option for ACI codes in member design as of now. They have a number of other links as well: Tekla Links

Software with API options will allow you to do what you want, but you should look thru Celt's discussions to get an idea of the work that entails. He does a lot with API interfaces and python scripting. IDS is mad with his Excel, so I would look at his site for ideas to do it all in excel.

 

[rapt]

RAPT would require you to use it's UI, but has options for

- multiple Point loads input at with different spacings. The simplest version of that is all point loads have the same value and spacing.

- A new load case can copy the loads from a previously defined load case, so all you would have to change would be the load values.

 

[MHobbs]

Hi William, I am also interested in prestressed design. We have a Tekla license here but it doesn't have prestressed design function.
Have you tried any of the suggestions above, which software has been the most useful?