Can solid steel bars/plates be added to the list of structural shapes available in the steel beam design module? Alternately, how about the ability to create a custom steel shape, much like the wood beam module allows custom wood shapes? I have a situation where I need to check a steel plate being used as a beam within a wood section but without considering any of the properties of the wood. It’s kind of like a steel plate being attached to the face of a wood stud wall to allow an opening below, or a flitch beam where the wood sections are insignificant. Not exactly, but similar to that.
Absent an option for a custom shape, or simply for an option with a flat bar, I tried to fake a result by using the flitch beam option. However, the module requires the wood to be taller than the steel plate. I then created a deeper custom wood shape of 0.01 thickness, but the program doesn’t consider the steel for shear, so that approach also has a failing result.
That was a fun little exercise, but it wasn’t a viable work-around.
This could be very handy. To add to the list would be the ability to use a custom shape for one span, say a cantilever, and then a standard shape for the rest of the span. For instance a W-Section shaped to a WT-Section at the cantilever.
We would also like to see custom bar/plate sections available in the steel design module (for design about both axis) as a high priority. They are extremely common in residential construction for strengthening existing timber members as Wilsonengineers has identified. As Wilson mentioned, I am envisaging something like the wood custom shapes as well, simple and effective. Is this something that can be added to the to do list in the near future? Thanks guys, appreciate the help.
Thanks for the message here James! Very interesting to see the same use case as @WilsonEngineers mentioned where you want to add some steel plates but ignore the contribution of the wood (guessing it’s deteriorated or ungraded). We’ll take a look as a team!
Yes its typically used in the application where you have an existing timber member and you want to remove an internal post. In a lot of instances its a lot easier to just continuously fix a new relatively seamless steel plate to the side of the existing timber to strengthen its deflection and bending capacity and just rely on the existing timbers connection back to the remaining supports.
For simplicity of the calculations we generally just conservatively consider the timber beam as doing nothing, except providing torsional restraint for the steel plate.
So yes allowing the design of plates would be very useful. Thanks for the consideration.