ASDIP FOUNDATION is a structural engineering software for design of footing members. It includes some new features such as the Footing Design Manager, the generation of the Footing Schedule, and the exporting of this schedule to Excel. This post is a brief overview of how these new features work, and how to use them to complete the design in less time and boost your productivity.
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Design of Spread Footings
The design of spread footings may be cumbersome and time-consuming. After defining the loads, it's necessary to perform the footing analysis in order to find the soil bearing pressures, shears, moments, stability check, load transfer, etc. This task by itself can be complex if done by hand. Once these forces are calculated, the next step is to design the reinforcement to provide the required strength.
Spread Footing Design Manager
The Design Manager is a tool that performs a preliminary design of the footing based on the loading conditions and your preferred bar sizes. The Design Manager will find the footing dimensions to keep the bearing pressures under the allowable values. In addition, it will calculate the required number of reinforcing bars along the spread footing to make sure that the bending capacity ratio is less than 1.0.
The user could do this from scratch by selecting the dimensions and number of bars at the footing, in a trial-and-error exercise, but this labor would be tedious and time-consuming. Instead, the Design Manager will do this by the click of a button. Then the designer can complete and fine-tune the design easily, with minimum effort.
To open the Design Manager, go to the Reinforcement tab and click in the new button at the top of the page, as shown below. For those cases where the loads are imported from ETABS, the software will do a preliminary design of the footing as the calculation is open.
ASDIP FOUNDATION generates graphical views of the bearing, one-way shear, punching shear, and bending conditions, as well as a construction view of the spread footing in plan and elevation, showing all rebars. It should be noted that all these views immediately reflects any change in the input values.
Generating a Footing Schedule
Once the design of the spread footings has been completed, it's time to show them in a construction drawing. If you are designing just one or two footings, you can probably show a footing elevation for each footing in your drawings. However, a typical concrete building may have several dozens of footings in the design.
Now ASDIP FOUNDATION can generate a Footing Schedule, which is a pre-formatted table that shows the most relevant information about every footing in your project. This feature may save you hours of your time. Instead of copying the information of each footing manually, now you can let ASDIP generate the schedule for you.
Exporting Footing Schedule to Excel
ASDIP allows you to export the footing schedule to an Excel file. This will boost your productivity since the schedule can now be copied and pasted from your spreadsheet directly to your construction drawing.
Takeaway
ASDIP FOUNDATION now includes three new features: Design Manager, which will produce a preliminary design of the footing, Footing Schedule, which will show the design of all the footings in a tabular format, and Export to Excel, which will allow to copy/paste of the schedule to the construction drawing.
For engineering background, see the blog post Spread Footing Design Using ASDIP FOUNDATION
. For our collection of blog posts about footing design please visit Foundation Design.
Detailed information is available about this structural engineering software by visiting ASDIP FOUNDATION. You are invited to download the Free 15-day Software Trial, or go ahead and Place your Order.