Automatic member design

 

An additional feature of many of the Structural Engineering Library programs is automatic selection of sizes that satisfy your specified design criteria.

 

Select the Summary / Results Tab again and take a look at the stress ratio. From the partial screen image below you can see that our 5-1/8" x 24" size guess was pretty close, but it is still overstressed (by 1.6%).

 

 

Rather than randomly trying other sizes from the database, we will use the Automatic Design function to select an optimum member size for us. When you select the Design Button a screen is displayed that allows you to set the design criteria.

 

                             

 

On this screen please set the "Section Type" to Glued-Lamininated, Maximum Stress Ratio = 1.0, and a Minimum Total Deflection Ratio to 240. When these items are set you can press the [GO] button and the software will automatically search the built-in Wood Section Database for all the sections that satisfy this criteria using the beam, load, and stress grade information you have selected.

 

You can see we have select Glued-Laminated type beams and set the maximum stress ration to 0.97......that will give us a slightly conservative design with no member suggested that is over 97% of full stress. We'll select [GO] and after a brief moment the following screen will be displayed.

 

Notice how the members can be listed in different orders: Stress Ratio, Deflection Ratio, Width, or Depth. This allows you to review the beam sizes that pass your criteria in different ways.

 

 

We will highlight the 5.125 x 37.5 beam and press the [Select] button. The final design (with General Tab) showing looks like this....