There may be a multitude of reasons why the program crashes, see the following known issues and fixes below.
Item #1:
As of Oct 2019, the crash may be occurring due to a large material name. AutoPIPE internal limit for material name is 15 characters, however STAADS limit is much higher.
For example: material used in a model was “STEEL_ASTM_A500_GRADE_B_RECTANGULAR_AND_SQUARE” which is 46 characters (TFS-1061309).
Avoidance:
The work around for this user was to reduce the name of the above mentioned material to fit 15 characters within STAAD before exporting to AutoPIPE.
See Also
Crashed when Importing / Inserting