This manual describes the Building Model add-on for the RFEM 6 program. It organizes your 3D model into defined stories, significantly simplifying the modeling and design of multi-story buildings. With the add-on, you can define stories for your building and then customize them in various ways: You can perform bracing calculations, design walls, analyze slabs as separate 2D structures, determine key parameters for the dynamic analysis, and much more.
Possibilities of the Building Model Add-on
The add-on simplifies the load distribution and adopts story-specific stiffness settings, enabling precise seismic evaluation and global stability analysis based on realistic building behavior. You assign rigid, semi-rigid, or flexible planes to each story independently and control the in-plane and out-of-plane stiffness to accurately represent multi-story systems. Automated checks for story actions, displacements, and sensitivity coefficients allow for a quick verification. Additionally, the add-on automatically identifies the center of mass and center of rigidity for each story, which allows for early detection of torsional irregularities and optimization of the wall layout. The design of slabs and walls is carried out in conjunction with other add-ons, such as Concrete Design or Timber Design.
Activating the Building Model Add-on
You can activate or deactivate the use of the special solution add-on in the Add-ons tab of the Model Base Data.
A green dot in front of the add-on description indicates that you have a license. An orange or blue dot indicates that you can only use the add-on as a demo or trial version and that the functional scope is limited.
After activating the 'Building Model' add-on, the user interface of RFEM is extended by new entries in the navigator, tables, and dialog boxes. Thus, the add-on is fully integrated into the RFEM program.
