International Design Codes

COMOSYS provides the user with the ability to design steel structures in accordance with many international design codes. These include the Turkish code, both the American Allowable stress design code AISC-ASD, the Load Resistance Factor Design code AISC-LRFD, the EuroCode EC3 etc.

Flexible Design Scenarios

Imagine a program which you could instruct to design a vertical bracing using single angles, but if that wasn’t enough to switch to back to back angles, and then to back to back channels and if even that didn’t suffice to go for large H sections. While doing all this you also want the program to omit the sections whose slenderness is above a certain limit. Furthermore you also want to limit the design cycle to those H sections whose flange widths are less than 200 for certain constructability reasons. But that is not all. You also want the program to rotate the profile by 90 degrees if that is providing a better slenderness ratio! Or let's say you are designing a special Crane girder which is composed of an H section with a channel placed over its top flange and its bottom flange is strengthened by a plate. Imagine telling the program to consider all geometrically appropriate combinations of the H and channel section and also check for various thickness values of the plate! This is the kind of flexibility COMOSYS provides the user making the design process a stroll in the park. Floor beams, trusses, frames, braces are all design according to well defined design scenarios which can be assigned to the elements the user wants designed.

Design Parameter Overrides

All design parameters intelligently calculated by COMOSYS can be overridden by the user for special cases. This ensures that for very specific situations the user is not left stranded with incorrect design parameters.

Intelligent Design Combo Generation

The design codes may give us only 5 or 6 design combos to be considered but in complicated structures these template Combos translate into hundreds of actual design combinations. Four wind directions, four earthquake directions, a few different locations of Crane loads, different levels of live loads for equipment (Normal live load, extreme live load etc. ) etc. all participate in blowing up the number of load combinations to almost unmanageable numbers. Furthermore manually entering these Design Combinations can become a tedious and error prone task. COMOSYS provides us with a unique feature which automatically expands the few template load combinations to hundreds of actual load combinations in a matter of seconds.

Design Evaluation

COMOSYS provides a unique feature called “Design Evaluation”. At the end of the design cycles all profiles more or less approach the red color showing that they are about to cross the acceptable limit. However this may not necessarily mean that the design is a good design. A good design is one in which the primary mode of failure is Normal Stress based, rather than displacement based or slenderness based or even shear stress based. If too many elements are approaching failure because of high deflections it probably means the structure could have been set up in a better way. If too many elements are failing because of their slenderness ratios reaching their acceptable limits it might be because of an incorrect use of profile type. If floor beams which should primarily be failing by M33 moments have significant M22 contributions something may be wrong with the chosen profile type. The “Design Evaluator” tool built into COMOSYS allows the user to quickly evaluate the quality of the design rather and pinpoint areas of weakness. This allows for much more refined designs to be produced.

Correct Calculation of K-Factors

The correct calculation of K factors used to predict the buckling length of members is easier said than done. This is all the more true if the structure is modeled according to the requirements of detailing. Most programs allow the user to override the automatically calculated K factors but this is not a good solution since these values need to be updated every time the sections change and therefore the process cannot be automated. COMOSYS provides a much more robust way of calculating the K factors speeding up the design procedure considerably.

One Click Design

COMOSYS provides a unique “One Click Design” feature which analyses the structure, checks the internal forces, assigns appropriate design sections, reanalyzes the structure with these new sections, recalculates the internal forces, reassigns new design sections and keeps doing this until all members converge to the lightest solution. While the interactive design approach in which the user goes through these steps manually is also available, this extremely useful option allows the user to finalize a design in a jiffy.

Deflection Checks

COMOSYS doesn’t just design a member for overstress. It also checks if the deflection is within specified limits for that particular element. Different criteria can be specified for columns, beams, purlins, Crane girders and other types of members and these criteria can even be dependent on the lengths of these members. Furthermore specific deflection criteria can be applied to individual members which lie outside the scope of these generalizations. Separate deflection criteria can be specified for the two independent directions of the member.

Special Design Checks

After finalizing the design COMOSYS also helps the user in making some global checks like global drifts, inter-storey drifts, torsional irregularities, storey shear comparison and storey moment comparison etc. These allow the user to stand back and take a global look at the overall behavior of the structure. Such checks are also useful is checking whether certain code requirements are being met or not.

Color Coded Design Output and Easy To Use Output Files

Since members are designed according to their stress ratios, the deflection ratios as well as their slenderness limits COMOSYS provides the user with the chance to color code these elements on the screen depending on whichever design parameter is dominant. This greatly increases the ease to visually inspect the whole structure and arrive at the best conclusions quickly. Furthermore COMOSYS creates extremely readable design output fi les where the design results have been summarized. Full design histories may also be reported.

Response Spectrum Analysis Combinations

Response spectrum cases are notorious for producing only positive results. The interaction between Axial, Moment and shear forces further complicates the issue as a negative Axial force value might be producing the greatest effect when combined with a positive Moment value. COMOSYS automatically takes into account all relevant positive and negative combinations of internal forces during the design process.