CONNECT Licensing
STAAD Foundation Advanced now uses Bentley's CONNECT License system, Bentley's new process for product activation and usage tracking, improving our licensing capabilities with features such as:
- License alert notifications when you are approaching a custom usage threshold
- Replacing site activation keys with user validation, enhancing security around your Bentley licenses and subscriptions
With traditional SELECT Licensing, product activation has been through an activation key that an Organization distributed to all users. With CONNECT Licensing, product activation is managed by user sign in through the CONNECTION Client, which is installed on each machine that uses Bentley applications. This offers a more secure and manageable system as it offers usage alerts, notifying your users when they are about to reach a certain usage limit set by the Administrator.
Detailed information is available at Bentley Communities Licensing and Activation Wiki
ACI 318-2014
For the foundation types in the General Mode and PLANT mode of the program for which design per the ACI 318 code is available, the 2014 edition of the code has been implemented. Those types include isolated footings, combined footings, pilecaps, mat foundations, strap, horizontal vessels (heat exchangers), etc.
This edition can be selected at the time of creating a new job, or editing an existing job. See the following figure.
In terms of functionality, all the checks that were performed by older versions of this code are performed by this edition too. This includes checks such as one-way shear, punching shear, flexure, development length, etc.
The code name and year will be displayed at the top of the calculation sheet.
The equations of that code used in the calculations for the various checks are displayed in the calculation sheet.
The 2014 edition of the code is not yet available for the foundation types in the toolkit mode.
Utilizing passive pressure resistance in overturning and sliding checks
For isolated footings, the resistance offered by passive pressure of soil to lateral forces and overturning moments can now be considered in the stability calculations.
Details are available in the Help manual in the topic titled Utilizing Passive Pressure Resistance in Overturning and Stability Checks
Pedestal Design per Eurocode 2 for Isolated Footings
For isolated footings, design of the pedestal is now performed per the EC2 code BS EN-1992-1-1: 2004 with the British Annex.
The pedestal is designed for two effects:
1. Axial load + biaxial bending using the general principles of column design
2. Shear force along two principal (orthogonal) directions using the general principles of shear design for beams
In the SFA Help manual, see Pedestal Design per Eurocode 2 for Isolated Footings for details.
Soil Excavation Volume and Backfill Volume
For isolated footings designed to ACI 318, STAAD Foundation Advanced now reports the following quantities:
- Soil Excavation Volume
This is the volume of soil contained in a pit that must be dug before the foundation and pedestal can be cast. In the following figure, it is represented by the container with the blue colored walls.
The top of the container is the ground level.
- Soil Backfill Volume
This represents the volume of soil that must be poured back in the pit after the footing and pedestal are cast. It is numerically equal to the soil excavation volume minus the volume of concrete contained in the footing and pedestal. Only the portion of the pedestal between the ground level and the top of footing is considered in the concrete volume quantity calculation.
The details of this feature are available in the What’s New in CONNECT Edition V9.0 section of the Help manual.
Utilizing the Cohesive Strength of Soil for Resistance to Sliding and Overturning
For isolated footings designed to the Indian code, the resistance offered by the cohesive strength of soil to lateral forces and overturning moments is an option available (in addition to passive resistance) to augment the resistance to overturning and sliding. This too is an optional item, meaning, the engineer is given a choice as to whether you want to include this resistance.
In the SFA Help manual, refer to the topic titled Utilizing the Cohesive Strength of Soil for Resistance to Sliding and Overturning for details.
Rectification of defects
A number of improvements have been made in the program in areas such as handling of input, removal of defects in calculations for some of the foundation modules, display of output, printing, drawing generation, stability related aspects that resulted in crashes or caused the program to freeze, etc