Modeling
Standard Sections
Any cross-section can easily be created. Define reinforced concrete rectangular and circular sections.
Confined Sections
Use auto created confinement zones for rectangular and circular or draw your own confinement zones.
Holes and Cutouts
Shapes can be be subtracted from anywhere on a cross-section, creating complex voided sections.
Editing Sections
Move, flip, mirror, and rotate to place cross-section and shapes in desired location. Use stacking, alignment and merge to combine shapes.
Complex Sections
More than 50 parametric shapes, defined by simple dimensions, and more than 3000 standard steel shapes, are ready to be used in composite columns. Edit parametric shapes and draw arbitrary shapes using the polygon drawing tool. You can merge parametric or drawn shapes to create complex new shapes.
Reinforcement
Add rebars of any size anywhere in the cross-section and use individual, corner, side, perimeter, linear, and circular distribution tools to distribute bars appropriately.
Steel Stress-Strain Curves
Use different stress-strain curves to model various materials and properties, from simple linear and rectangular stress blocks to parabolic curves.
Loading
Loading and Capacity
Visualize the loading and capacity of a selected column in 2D and 3D.
Slenderness Considerations
CSiCol performs magnified-moment calculations based on ACI-318 and BS-8110, and will perform effective-length calculation for sway and non-sway load combinations. There are options to input detailed loads for slenderness calculations or to directly input design actions. Column-framing conditions are used to determine effective-length factors for computing slenderness effects.
Effective-Length Factor
Several cases of end-framing conditions are considered for computing effective-length factors of frames.
Analysis
Elastic-Stress Calculations
CSiCol will calculate the elastic stresses for axial load and biaxial bending moments. 2D and 3D cracked-stress contours for both reinforced and composite sections can also be displayed.
Stress and Strain Plots
The stresses and strains in concrete and reinforcement can be computed for a given set of loads, as well as the orientation and location of the neutral axis.
Design
Capacity Calculations
CSiCol will generate full capacity interaction surfaces, P-M curves for any given bending direction, M-M curves for any given load level, neutral axis orientation and stress-strain diagrams for any given load condition.
Moment-Curvature Relationships
CSiCol will generate Moment-Curvature diagrams for a given axial load and moment direction for specified failure criteria.
Section Design
CSiCol will automatically find the most suitable column section and reinforcement for a given set of loads. The auto-design options can be used to control the way the design solution is found and the order in which the dimensions and reinforcement are changed. You can also specify the minimum and maximum values of various parameters and the increment to be used. Auto design can also include the evaluation of slenderness effects.
Animate PMM Surface
View the animation of capacity-surface generation for different neutral-axis angles.
Maximum-Curvature Plot
Generate maximum-curvature plots showing the variation of maximum curvature for different axial loads.
Reporting
Report Generation
Reports can be viewed in the form of a Column Summary, a simple one-page report, or a Detailed Report.
