Bentley 2006 User Manual

 

 
 
 

About STAAD.Pro  

 

STAAD.Pro is a general purpose structural analysis and design program with 

applications primarily in the building industry - commercial buildings, bridges and 

highway structures, industrial structures, chemical plant structures, dams, retaining 

walls, turbine foundations, culverts and other embedded structures, etc. The program 

hence consists of the following facilities to enable this task. 

 

1.  Graphical model generation utilities as well as text editor based commands for 

creating the mathematical model. Beam and column members are represented using 

lines. Walls, slabs and panel type entities are represented using triangular and 

quadrilateral finite elements. Solid blocks are represented using brick elements. 

These utilities allow the user to create the geometry, assign properties, orient cross 

sections as desired, assign materials like steel, concrete, timber, aluminum, specify 

supports, apply loads explicitly as well as have the program generate loads, design 

parameters etc. 

2.  Analysis engines for performing linear elastic and pdelta analysis, finite element 

analysis, frequency extraction, and dynamic response (spectrum, time history, 

steady state, etc.). 

3.  Design engines for code checking and optimization of steel, aluminum and timber 

members. Reinforcement calculations for concrete beams, columns, slabs and shear 

walls. Design of shear and moment connections for steel members. 

4.  Result viewing, result verification and report generation tools for examining 

displacement diagrams, bending moment and shear force diagrams, beam, plate and 

solid stress contours, etc. 

5.  Peripheral tools for activities like import and export of data from and to other 

widely accepted formats, links with other popular softwares for niche areas like 

reinforced and prestressed concrete slab design, footing design, steel connection 

design, etc. 

6.  A library of exposed functions called OpenSTAAD which allows users to access 

STAAD.Pro’s internal functions and routines as well as its graphical commands to 

tap into STAAD’s database and link input and output data to third-party software 

written using languages like C, C++, VB, VBA, FORTRAN, Java, Delphi, etc. 

Thus, OpenSTAAD allows users to link in-house or third-party applications with 

STAAD.Pro.