www.sefindia.org

[sukanta.adhikari]

Dear All

Tried something different apart from Technical


ME & STAAD (SOMETHING ABOUT ME & SOMETHING ABOUT MY AFFILIATION WITH STAAD)


Regards
S Adhikari

Posted via Email

[rahul.leslie]

Dear Adhikari,

Your write up was interesting and gave me nostalgia of my beginnings with the STAAD software -- STAAD-III/ISDS of those days, the forerunner of STAAD.Pro.  

After my graduation, soon i came to about the STAAD software, and i joined for the course here in Trivandrum, my home city.
Halfway through the course, i was offered to join the firm as an instructor for STAAD, and then moved on to handling on-site STAAD training as well as technical support to the software... it gives me great pleasure to remember that i was fortunate to introduce STAAD, in those days, in the very office i was later to join, in about a decade later -- the Kerala PWD Design wing. The other govt. departments i gave STAAD training and techical support includes the design wings of Electricity Board, Housing Board, etc

(...to be continued)

[rahul.leslie]

Before Windows-95 was out, STAAD-III was DOS based, yet its interface looked like a windows app: with pop-up dialog boxes, radio buttons and all that.. much to our surprise we noticed that these boxes couldn't be moved around like in Windows. We had few 386 computers, still running STAAD-III in DOS then.

STAAD-III those days didn't have the custom spaced grid definitions we have today in STAAD.Pro. So for the usual structures, until the model has been plotted to a point where it has enough nodes to connect the rest of the beams to, we used to type coordinates after coordinates in a small box below the graphics screen, prompting the new node to get auto-connected with the just pevious one, by a beam in the process. But compared to the ASAP program we had in College (a PC version of the legendary SAP-IV of the Mainframe age), STAAD-III was heaven. However, "wow ... escape from the cumbersome Kani's method forever" was my impression of both STAAD-III and ASAP.

Floor Loads those days could be applied only to rectangular bays,.. no Floor Load for triangular slabs, no Floor Load application with beam list specification, and so, no Floor Load for inclined roof structures either. Compare this to the latest STAAD today, where L and T shaped slabs, and even slabs at the floor edges, supported by only three beams (with the forth edge being free), can be easily handled by the Floor Load command.

(...to be continued)

[rahul.leslie]

...my old cert.

[rahul.leslie]

In the 386 computers (ie., computers with the old Intel i386 processors) that many had those days, it took quite a while for the run to complete... actually those days, the analysis phase was faster than the design phase, with both the processes together taking more than a couple of hours for analysis and full design of a multi-storied building: a throwback scenario of how it would have been, a few years before i first learned STAAD-III. The 486 computers made things much faster.
I remember there was a component design app in STAAD-III to help with design of individual elements like footings, slabs, retaining walls etc. (much like a mini Prokon inside STAAD-III). Its library was later expanded and renamed "STAAD.etc", but which was later phased out altogether.

     All these details of STAAD-III, I'm jotting from memory, are of about quarter a century old. Those days, while being exposed to only STAAD-III, I still remember the surprise that clicking open the first beta version of STAAD/Pro (as it was called then) gave me. That was during 1998, i think. That excitement i felt matches only with my opening the beta version of STAAD.X, during around 2011, if i remember correctly: it was a major deviation from STAAD.Pro. STAAD.X had plate like 'Floor elements' that you provide and load them, instead of the Floor Load facility. STAAD.X never took off, for very convincing reasons that the company later explained. But that's another story

(to be continued...)

[rahul.leslie]

After serving for an year and a few months with STAAD training and support, i joined for PG course in Structural Engg, culminating with doing my thesis, in our space organization, during the late 1999, in ANSYS, a general purpose, very advanced FE analysis program. It further enhanced my understanding of the Finite Element method, adding upon what I've already imbibed through learning STAAD-III. Ever since then, the way i think about FE models and their analysis is in terms of STAAD or ANSYS (what ETABS shows on its screen is not an FE model).

As luck has it, i got a chance to help one of my juniors in college do her thesis in writing FE programs in FORTRAN, thus being able to understand the intricacies that run behind the method, including that behind STAAD -- its very nuts and bolts. That experience also helped me explain things better when i was handling FEM classes for PG batches during those years i was an Assistant Professor in an Engg. College -- the essence of FEM is actually in its programming.

Fast forward to my early years in the PWD, STAAD.Pro was the most used one among us in our office (while we also had colleagues working in STRAP and NISA/Civil, later ETABS too joined the list), and after a decade since my joining, our office as a whole decided to  shift to ETABS, and has remained so till date. I'm however still in touch with STAAD, managing to update myself with its new features.

STAAD.PRO and ANSYS makes easy transferring model to and fro between the two – their coordinate systems are the same, and for both, everything can be done via an editor listing. I once did a personal (or rather hobby) investigation of a tall building subjected to wind, having obtained the wind tunnel data of it. I modelled the building fully in STAAD, transferred the data from the STAAD to ANSYS input format, and did the time history analysis in ANSYS.

(to be continued)...