Hello,
I have a podium building, 2 concrete flat slab levels supporting 5 wood (other) load bearing wall levels. It's a large building, like city block sized. The model runs fine in Frame, but it takes over 7 minutes. We export the results from Frame to design spreadsheets to design the wood. That part seems to be going fine.
The main problem I'm having is that I can't get the model to run in Concrete in a reasonable amount of time. The slabs will be designed separately in Concept, but I need Concrete to run to design the lower level concrete columns and shear walls. But I can't get there because I can't get through Concrete gravity analysis. At first I ran it and it took hours to get through not even 2 of 7 levels and I cancelled it. Seems to get stuck in "Creating nodal loads from reactions". I changed a few analysis options to try to make it run better and ran again. It did seem to run slightly faster but then I got an error that a node is too close to itself (same node number, 0.000” apart, wouldn’t you know) and to crapped out. But even if it hadn’t it was going to take an unreasonable amount of time to run. Probably well over an hour. So my first question is, do I have something set wrong that it’s running this way? If not, is there anything I can do to dumb down or simplify the wood levels to get it to run reasonably?
My other issue is regarding the f1 factor for LRFD load combos. In generating combos is looks like we have only one chance to set it. But my podium building has one level of parking at the bottom (LL=40psf), then the podium level above has the equivalent of 200 psf from 5 levels. Setting f1 to 1.00 for the entire structure because 40 of 240 psf is parking would be overly penalizing it. But using 0.5 would go against the code instruction to use 1.0 for parking garages. Is there any way to set it to 1.00 just for the garage level? How is this is typically handled in buildings that are only partially garage? Seems like it could be set up to use 0.5 automatically for reducible LL and 1.0 for un-reducible, since this is the same distinction in the code (over 100 psf and garages) and RAM already has a LL tag for reduce/unreduce.
Thank you,
Chris Martin
