When working with houses, I often find myself using dummy members for the sole purpose of calculating a reaction. For example: trusses and truss girders where the design is by the truss engineer. It would be handy if there was a way to turn off the member selection and analysis portions of the calculation to not complicate the presentation.
For example, I am working with a 35ft long clear-span truss acting on a floor joist cantilever. It’s not a great detail, but the Clear Calcs package looks weird with double 18" LVLs that I am specifying in lieu of trusses just so I have a reaction to link from. I have no need to know how that dummy member performs so it would be clean to use see n/a in the calc.
Hi @WilsonEngineers, thanks for the suggestion here. Have you come across our Beam Analysis with Load Combinations calculators for LRFD and ASD? The way these work, they entirely skip design code checks so you can just enter a straight loading and self weight if desired. We created these explicitly to address your use case here for users who wanted dummy calcs without the design. Let us know if this helps?
Well, hot damn… I’ve seen those, but quickly aborted when I saw the EI and EA inputs. Those two inputs require thought and I often don’t have extra thoughts to spare. I am also only looking for simple span beam reactions so maybe I’ll just plug in something that gets me close to infinitely stiff and see how that goes.
The EA and EI values for a roof truss, for example, would not be immediately obvious so a plug would have to do.
On that note, a toggle for “infinitely stiff” for simple span members would make these two modules even easier to use.
Hi @WilsonEngineers reaction values are independent on stiffness values (EI and EA) for simple supported beams or continuous beams with same section/material along its length - in this case, the stiffness only affects deflection. So you can use the Beam Analysis with Load Combinations calculators, as Chris said, forget about EI and EA inputs, and save your thoughts for other problems! Let me know if you have any other questions
