User Guide

RISA-3D User’s Guide
Version 5.0
36
Click the arrow next to the text that says “A36” to open the drop down menu of
hot rolled materials. Select A992 for the beam material as shown in the figure
below:
Notice that the Section Set data consists of a number of entries. The Shape entry
indicates the current size that will be used for the member. The Design List and
Design Rules entries tell the program what list of shapes to use and what design
restrictions to impose when it tries to re-design / optimize the member. Refer to
Appendix A of the General Reference Manual for more information on Design
Lists.
Click the arrow next to the text that says “Col-Rules” to open the drop down
menu of Design Rules. Select “Steel-Bms” for the Design Rule.
The Type entry lets the program know whether the member is a beam, column, or
brace. This is especially important for the design of concrete sections. Finally,
the A, Iyy, Izz and J columns list the area, moments of inertia and torsional
constant for the current shape.
By default the current shape is a W5xX6. This is because it is the first shape
available in the Wide Flange design list. Since this is obviously too small of a
shape for most applications, we want to select a more realistic starting shape for
our design. If you know what shape you want to use, you could type it in directly.
But, if you don’t know the database by heart you may not know what shape you
want until you see it. Therefore, we will open up the database and take a look at
the full list of available shapes.
Click on the first cell in the Shape column and your screen will look like this:
Click the arrow in the cell and a dialog is opened that lists the shapes in our hot
rolled database.