Etabs Wall Design

[Cristoforo Kanoy]

Oneof the useful tools in ETABS program is the Shear Wall Design capability. It is not only limited in the analysis of walls but it can also perform the design and check. The designer can be opted to either use the Reinforcement to Designed or Reinforcement to be checked option. When you require the program to do the design, choose the Designed option and Checked when you let yourself assigned the wall reinforcement to be verified by the program.

When the pier section is specified to check for the rebar details specified by the designer, the program creates an analysis to determine the flexural demand/capacity ratio, the required area for shear rebar for the selected pier and other output results to determine whether the section is passed or failed.

Referred to as Simplified Compression and Tension this option can only design planar walls and has no option for a checked design. In this option, the pier geometry is defined by the length, thickness, and sizes of each member at each end of the pier. The pier section flexural design will be performed to edge strip of the wall section and it ignores the resistance from the middle strip.

The program will report the required width of the edge strip to resist the axial and overturning moment required reinforcing in the governing compression and tension load combination. When dealing with shear design the full length of the pier section and reports the required shear reinforcing per unit length. This design option is best to use to determine and design the boundary zones or the boundary elements of shear walls, especially in high seismic areas.

The uniform Reinforcing option is applicable to either design or check both planar walls and coupled shear walls (spandrels). For flexural design or check, the previously defined pier section is automatically picked up by the program and do the design or check. For boundary zones checks and shear design, it analyses the pier sections up into the planar legs and then performs the design and analysis on each leg separately. In this option, the sections assigned as pier will be designed or checked for the uniform reinforcing that the designer assigns.

To do this, the designer should select the pier section or the wall to design and go to Design>Shear Wall Design>Uniform Reinforcing and the figure below will appear. In the following figure, the designer has the option to select which bar size and spacing to provide. You can either tick the Reinforcement to be Checked and Reinforcement to be designed. The reinforcement provided is then verified if passed or failed by going to Display>Show Table>Shear Wall Summary. The interpretation of these results will be further explained in the upcoming articles to be published soon.

This section can be defined using the section designer that is built in ETABS wherein the designer can create any geometrical shapes. The designer can also play with the rebar diameters and spacing. The concept of this option is almost similar to the Uniform Reinforcing because the designer has the option to define rebar sizes and spacing. Shear design can be performed similarly with Uniform Reinforcing.

When using the General Reinforcing section go to Design>Shear Wall Design>General Reinforcing and the below figure will appear. The designer can assign which section to assign at the bottom and at the top of the pier with the option to either checked or designed.

Of the three designed/checked options available in ETABS that are mentioned above, the author personally uses the Uniform Reinforcing Options as the most efficient design uses or utilizes all the wall sections not just only end zones. You can always check the end zones of the wall though calculating the boundary zones or boundary elements manually if your engineering judgment told you so. Refer to the video below on how the Uniform Reinforcement option can be done in ETABS. You can subscribe to our channel for more videos like this.

How about you? Which method above did you usually use and why? Tell us your thoughts! Leave a comment on the section below. Subscribe to our newsletter to be updated with the latest posts or follow us on our social media pages on the below icons.

In addition to structural models, if you have any way you envision speckle being used in a structural context i.e building a structural model from grasshopper or drawing lines in rhino to rebuild in ETABS or maybe converting from one structural model to another. Please let me know and post it here as well !

It is possible to access the E-tabs API and implement it. If you want to send an Analytical Model from Revit use Rhino Inside to extract the model to grasshopper and then you can use Geometry Gym Plugin for Grasshopper to send the model to E-tabs.

Sounds awesome, how do you imagine these formats of these results to be most useful? Spreadsheets for days? Or being able to visualize the results inside Rhino as well ? not sure if the latter is too useful since all structural programs have their innate visualization.

It is with the greatest pleasure that the Speckle team is releasing an official ETABS connector for Speckle. The release of this connector will enable Structural Engineers in the AEC industry to be connected with the Speckle world ?. This tool...

So If I have a bunch of walls or coupling beams in a high rise tower and I want to view envelope loads of all my load combinations etabs takes a while to generate all that information over and over again.

A good example is design changes. Lets say over the course of SD to DD I change my wall design 4-5 times due to architectural changes. It would be nice to know why I designed my wall how I did based on some diagram of the forces or how the model behaved at one point it time (forces being a proxy)

I am trying the etabs connector on v18, both send and receive are not working for me for some reason on very simple template models. The progress bar just keeps on showing progressing but doesnt conclude the transaction. Please anyone can help me in this.

Hello Engineers So I'm having this 7 story building on a sloped land, the occupied levels will be from zero level (Street level) to +3 level , 4 residential stories. the bottom three -3,-2,-1 are being constructed on three levels in order to avoid drilling and any excavation work, considering that building is on hard rock (top of a mountain), and it will be very costly in order to do so. there are many problems that I have Encountered, and I truly need the help from you guys. -the first one is that the occupied stories's structural system is a load bearing walls, rested on Dual system of shear walls and moment resisting frames(the bottom three stories) and now I am Having soft stories , is it correct to model brick walls in the model, as they participate in their stiffness, and if modeled and still there is a soft story, what should I do? as you can see from the figures, the story geometry, specially -3,-2, is way less than that upper floors, and I can't go much deeper downwards in order to increase the number of vertical element. -in the 3 bottom levels+ zero level, Center of mass and center of rigidity are way far from each other, "way more than 5%L", which eventually causes Extreme torsional irregularity, More than 1.4 max drift to avg displacement values are obtained when checked to static load cases, I even Added the two shear walls at the top of the plan on order to pull center of rigidity closer to center of mass, But still, No point of that.I once heard from an Engineer, that Even if the building has torsional irregularity, when you design Piers and columns using Etabs, the program already takes care of that irregularity, as much as I want to believe that, But I think that torsional irregularity is a matter of a hole building geometry and behavior Plus it's a code requirement , and increasing the area of reinforcement won't help, what's right and what's wrong ?-is there any other checks that I should Do ? , is there any recommendations/Suggestions ? **I would truly Appreciate Your help. thank you.

Numerous design programs support masonry analysis and design, for both component design and finite element analysis (FEA) and design. As engineers, it is important to not only know what programs are available and when to use them, but also the common issues with software and how to avoid them.

We recommend using FEA programs for walls that are either complicated or have a reasonably high load demand, which includes: walls with relatively large openings, shear walls with openings, masonry wall groups used with stair and elevator shafts, exterior walls with high loads, multistory masonry walls, and storm shelter walls. FEA programs are required for understanding the true load on all masonry lintels.

It also can design hybrid masonry/frame structures and handles both reinforced and unreinforced masonry using concrete masonry units or clay brick units in a variety of compressive strengths and unit configurations.

About RAM Elements V16 (from Bentley Systems, Inc.)

-line/structural-analysis-software/ram-elements

FORSE

We recommend using component design programs for walls that are less complicated and have common load demand, which includes: partition walls, single story building with many walls and low in-plane shear loads, walls with relatively small openings.

When in seismic design category (SDC) A, it is not necessary to use any of the provisions of Chapter 12. Instead, the general structural integrity provisions of Section 1.4 apply. Note that these provisions include some loads that may often be erroneously neglected. The required lateral forces include 1% of dead load, 5% of dead plus live load for beam (axial load) connections, and 20% of wall weight for wall connections. Non-structural components in SDC A are exempt from seismic design requirements. See [1.4], [11.4.1], and [11.7].

The importance factor is based upon the risk category and the associated life safety, hazard or essential nature of the structure. Both [Table 1.5-1] and [IBC Table 1604.5] should be reviewed. A typical building can sometimes evolve into an Ie equal to 1.25 or 1.5 when occupancy or use expands. Examples include relatively small churches (expanding to an occupancy greater than 300) or a building where hazardous materials are stored. It should be noted that for building design, Ie = 1.0, 1.25, or 1.5; but for non-structural components, Ip = 1.0 or 1.5 only [13.1.3], such that Ip may not equal Ie, and in some instances Ip may be less than Ie. See [11.5.1] and [Table 1.5-2].

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