The events of recent years remind us of the importance of earthquake engineering in seismic regions. For you as an engineer, the design of structures in earthquake-prone areas is a constant trade-off between economic efficiency – the financial possibilities – and structural safety. If a collapse is inevitable, engineers must estimate how it will affect the structure. This article aims to provide you with an option on how to perform this estimation.
In the case of horizontal beam-like supporting structures, the favorable and unfavorable load components of the permanent actions should be considered separately. In RFEM and RSTAB, you can do this as follows.
Parametric input allows you to enter the model data and load data in a specific way so they are dependent on certain variables (parameters). You can enter the parameters directly or calculate them from other parameters and constants, and furthermore, it is possible to access the cross-section values. This can be useful, for example, when calculating precambers, depending on the standard.
Supports can be copied and moved using drag & drop, even if the "Move/Copy" function is not available in the shortcut menu. This applies to all kinds of supports: nodal supports, line supports, and surface supports. These can easily be assigned to further nodes, lines, or surfaces.
If you want to remove redundant nodes but keep connected objects, you can right-click the relevant node and select the "Delete Nodes" and "Merge Connected Members" options. In addition to members, you can also merge lines in RFEM.
In RFEM and RSTAB, you can define a user-defined combination scheme. This can be helpful if a desired combination scheme cannot be created from a standard. In such cases, you can export the created load cases to Excel, create the scheme there, then import them to RFEM or RSTAB.
For a clearer display of the structure, you can display it in different colors. The corresponding selection can be opened by right-clicking the work window.
Under Options II in the Help Assistant tab of the program options, you can define the limit values for warning messages that appear after a successful calculation.
In the display properties, you can select Results → Support Reactions → Nodal Moments to specify whether a support moment should be displayed as an arc or a vector.
Generally, overlapping members in the model are not desired. To prevent RFEM from deleting an already defined member if another member is placed upon it, select "Allow Double Members" on the "Edit" menu.
In this article, representations of a blast scenario of a remote detonation performed in RF-DYNAM Pro - Forced Vibrations are shown, and the effects are compared in the linear time history analysis.