📺How to design Ground Beams, Rafts & Pile Caps in MasterSeries [WEBINAR RECORDING]

Posted on December 16th, 2020 in Webinars

Summary

This webinar by MasterSeries Software offers a comprehensive guide to designing concrete ground beams, pile caps, and rafts using their structural analysis software. The presentation emphasizes efficient loading techniques, particularly area loading, over individual line loads, and highlights the importance of pattern loading to account for various load combinations across continuous spans. The software facilitates automated concrete design, allowing users to define reinforcement parameters and curtailment methods, even offering a "super member" feature for consolidating reinforcement across multiple short spans. Additionally, the webinar covers the design of pile caps, including considerations for pile arrangement, eccentricity, and shear, and delves into raft design using finite element analysis, demonstrating how to apply loads, define supports with spring stiffness, and interpret bending moment and displacement results to determine reinforcement.

Key Concepts

• Concrete Design Basics
• Ground Beam Design
• Pile Cap design
• Raft slab desgin
• Loading and Anaylsis

Description

This YouTube webinar recording, "How to Auto-generate Wind Loading on complex buildings?", provides a comprehensive overview of MasterSeries software's capabilities for performing wind analysis and automatically generating wind loading on structural models, particularly for complex building geometries.

Here's a summary of the key aspects discussed:

• MasterSeries Overview & Integration:

    ◦ MasterSeries offers a range of integrated products, including building design suites, MasterPort, and MasterFrame.

    ◦ Wind analysis is fully integrated into these suites, allowing users to purchase it as a component item if needed.

• Basic Wind Analysis Setup:

    ◦ Users start by defining basic information, including wind directions (sensibly at least two, but often four or more).

    ◦ Internal pressure and suction values are selected, and the building type (e.g., steel framed) is specified to calculate Cscd factors.

    ◦ Building orientation (North) is set.

    ◦ Site data is crucial for accurate wind calculations. This involves using a map or a national grid reference to pinpoint the building's location (e.g., Edinburgh, Cork). The system can account for topography and automatically determines relevant factors.

    ◦ Users select the Eurocode method (or Designer's Guide method) and the occurrence period (e.g., 1 in 50 years).

    ◦ The software then calculates q values (wind pressures) at various heights, which can differ significantly (e.g., nearly doubling from 3.5m to 9m).

• Applying Wind Loading on Panels:

    ◦ The software offers an "auto" generation feature for wind panels, significantly simplifying the process compared to manually adding loads to individual members.

    ◦ It automatically designates wind surfaces but requires careful handling of bracing members, which must be correctly identified so the system can delineate panels accurately.

    ◦ The system then calculates wind coefficients (Cp values) for different areas (leading edges, internal areas, roof) for each specified wind direction, showing variations (e.g., 1.3 on leading edge, 0.7 internally, 3.5 on the roof).

    ◦ It also determines the physical wind pressure values by applying the q values to these coefficients.

• Managing Load Cases:

    ◦ Instead of manually creating numerous load cases for different wind directions, internal pressures, and ultimate/serviceability combinations, MasterSeries can auto-generate load cases.

    ◦ Users can import templates of loading cases (e.g., basic Eurocode cases) that consider dead, live, wind (including internal suction and pressure), and notional loads.

    ◦ This rapid generation can create a large number of load cases (e.g., 104) quickly, covering all permutations.

• Analysis and Stiff Deck Assumption:

    ◦ The software performs static analysis on the space frame, accounting for tension-only bracing members in a non-linear fashion.

    ◦ To properly distribute wind loads and prevent localized deflections, especially in structures with slabs, users can apply a semi-rigid stiff deck assumption (e.g., a 200mm concrete slab with specified 'E' value). This ties all bays together, ensuring the entire structure moves coherently under wind load.

• Handling Complex Geometries:

    ◦ The webinar demonstrates applying wind analysis to a complex building with curved facades, inset stories, re-entrant corners, parapets, and canopies.

    ◦ For structures where columns are set back, "dummy members" can be created to define the external edges for wind panels, ensuring accurate panel trimming.

    ◦ Re-entrant corners may require some manual fixing or the addition of dummy members to define missing panel elements.

    ◦ For buildings with inset stories, it's recommended to perform the auto-generation of wind panels in "bands" or "strips" (e.g., bottom, middle, top sections) rather than for the whole building at once. This allows the software to more accurately identify leading edges and correctly apply wind coefficients to each exposed section, preventing misinterpretation of surfaces as continuous.

    ◦ Parapets and canopies are automatically identified and loaded with wind pressure on both sides.

• User-Defined Wind Pressures and Output:

    ◦ For locations outside the UK and Ireland, users can input user-defined q values at various heights, overriding the internal site data calculations.

    ◦ The software can extract horizontal foundation reactions (Rx, Ry values) directly from the wind analysis results, providing essential data for foundation design.

    ◦ It also calculates reactions/loads onto beams.

    ◦ The concept of "open side" vs. "closed side" for panels is explained, often requiring dummy members to define edges where structural members are absent.

    ◦ Dominant openings can be accounted for by modifying internal pressure/suction values for specific wind directions.

    ◦ For multi-span roofs and portal frames, MasterPort has specific rules for handling wind loading variations and can transfer these to MasterFrame.

In essence, MasterSeries provides a simple, easy, and very flexible approach to wind analysis, capable of automatically generating complex wind loading scenarios, streamlining the design process, and offering detailed results for both simple and intricate structures.