Software to design Multistory Concrete Columns

[karthik_m]

Hello, I am looking for a software that is reliable enough to do multi story RC Columns rather than going old school and calculating trib areas from drawings for each column and then designing them separately in SP Column. Any inputs or thoughts shared would be beneficial ? Any good or bad experiences ? Things to look out for? Thank you.

 

[KootK]

Might as well get the ball rolling with the most obvious one: ETABS

 

[karthik_m]

@KootK : Have you used ETABS? Have you ever found any issues with the software?

 

[KootK]

I have used ETABS. It's mostly awesome. I wish that it handled shear wall cracking and composite shape shear wall design in more detail. It's purpose built for multi-story buildings of some regularity. It's efficiency diminishes with choppier, irregular buildings.

For taller buildings with a significant number of repeating floors, my preferred method is:

1) Run a basic FEM floor plate model of the typical floors to get loads delivered by them to the columns.

2) Toss the loads into a custom Excel sheet for individual column design.

I find this particularly at the early stages of design when you just need to provide the team with some reliable guidance on column sizes. Additionally, software element design is never quite as good as your own tool in my opinion. There's something to be said for having just what you want, just how you want it.

 

[KootK]

What software have you used and what are your feelings about them? I do consider S-Concrete to be a pretty great tool.

 

[karthik_m]

@ KootK: What is S-concrete? I do it the old school way calculating trib areas from drawings for each column and then designing them separately in SP Column. Okay good to know ETABS is good for design of RC Columns.

 

[Yao1989]

I am really not a big fan of the sp software. Huge black box with poor documentation.

S-Concrete can design any concrete section for like millions of load cases, and checks for every damn clause in the code, and gives you warning message for every code clause that you do not satisfy, for engineer to make judgement call. I literally learned concrete design by looking up all the warning messages and understanding them.

I second ETABS being great for “column rundown”, although in my past office it is discouraged and we always use excel column rundown using tributary area.

I usually find ETABS great for column loads, except I sometimes get discrepancies from hand check when it comes to angled columns.

 

[KootK]

@ KootK: What is S-concrete?

Oops. S-Concrete was what I thought you had mentioned but I now see that you really mentioned SP Column. S-Concrete is a one off design tool like SP Column although, as Yao noted, it's feature set is substantially richer.