Software Integration for Efficient Structural Design

Team has been fortunate to work on two great low-rise multi-family apartment projects in the last year in southern New Hampshire.  These are large projects that allowed us to bolster our skills with structural software integration and find the best ways to complete these designs as efficiently as possible.

At Team Engineering we use a combination of 3D Revit Modeling, and the RISA Suite of analysis software analyze the entire building in one go.  This allows greater coordination between the architectural model, and the structural model, as well as between gravity and lateral elements.

We start by drawing all the beams, columns, shear walls and any other specialty members into a model we receive from the Architect.  This helps us to see the full picture of the project and find elements and methods that will best integrate into the architecture and understand any unique situations or limitations that we need to design towards.  When this is complete the architecture can be hidden and what is left is just the structural bones of the building.  This becomes our analytical model to bring into other software’s we utilize.

The RISA Suite of software’s, these are powerful programs that allow us to design buildings as one complete system instead of element by element.  RISAFloor is used to apply gravity loads and member designations, which the program will take and carry through the entirety of the building and designs every, element, as well as checking for coordination issues.  Unfortunately, it is not as simple as it sounds and it takes multiple iterations to produce a building that meet all of our design parameters and clears any issues that RISAFloor finds in the model.

Once the RISAFloor analysis is complete the model is sent to RISA3D which checks for lateral capacity of shear elements against wind and seismic loading.  Shear walls are drawn in with all openings present in the architectural model and RISA3D designates required type and location of sheathing, as well as foundation hold-downs or floor to floor tension straps.  This is a great way to optimize the amount of shear walls needed by the structure, as well any additional hardware that will be required.

RISAFoundation is then used to design the foundations and check that there is adequate bearing capacity as well as enough concrete to properly install any anchors that were designed by RISA3D.

Finally, once the RISA Suite analysis is competed the initial 3D Revit model is updated to reflect the member sizes designed by RISA, and a full plan set is laid out and detailed.

Fully integrating multiple powerful drafting and analysis software’s allows Team Engineering to efficiently produce fully optimized and constructable plans for large and complex projects and it is an area of our expertise that we are excited to continue to expand.