Wind Loading on Exterior Beams

If you are designing a beam, why can’t you add wind load in the weak direction since it is part of the exterior wall system? The program allows you to put wind load on a column, and exterior stud wall but not the beam. Why? Please help. Thanks.

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Thanks for the post Sunny and welcome to our Blueprint Community!! For wind load on beams in the weak direction - the best way to do this in our beam calculator is to change the member orientation which means loads will be applied in the weak direction.

If you’re looking to add both gravity loads and wind loads to the same beam, that’s a little trickier. We don’t currently support biaxial loads in our beam calculator (we chose to do this to simplify load inputs), but we do support those in our column calculator. So you would be able to add your lateral loads in the strong and weak axes simultaneously in our column calculator.

Would love to hear your thoughts and the rest of the community’s about this - it’s something we’ve heard before and would love to clarify / simplify :slight_smile:

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I’ve been designing wind+gravity beams for 20+ years and (almost) never consider combined loading effects. Sure, it’s a classic example when studying for the PE exam to add stresses from loads acting in different vectors, but I can’t recall ever running into a real-world situation where stress controls over deflection. That’s at least relatively true for most wind beams on commercial buildings.

That said, it could be helpful to have a calculator capable of combining torsion and normal load effects, but that is still relatively uncommon.

That’s from my experience with facade and support system designs…

I would find biaxial loading for beams helpful as well. Since I done a few heavily loaded short headers, and I have run into situations where stress controls. While I do agree it’s uncommon that stress governs, even for deflection, I find it more than a little irritating to have two calculations for every exterior beam in my project for in-plane and out-of-plane loading.

I also second the idea of a torsion calculation combined with regular loading for steel beams; and would add to that idea additional options for support types for steel beams (e.g. weak-axis only supports), which may be helpful for a lengthy exterior beam.