Stirrup auto count on reinforced concrete structures

[IvanCyr]

For concrete beams in Chief, if its fabricated from concrete, Chief has specifications for "longitudinal" rebar with overlap and manually include # of bars/rods as "Rebar Count".  This is fairly basic.  However, regarding stirrups, there are a couple factors which are problematic for me and wonder if anyone has found an EASY answer.  I want to have Chief calculate the # of stirrups given a fixed spacing (which I can not find here only "Stirrup Count" which means I have to take the beam and divide the length by spacing, truncate the value and add one (usually).  This must be done manually for every concrete beam of various length.  Is there a known method to make this automatic??  Second, I would like to have Chief calculate the total length of stirrup rebar...which seems to be found within the beam's object properties and listed within Ruby Code as "total_stirrup_length".  What is not known here, although it would not be too hard to reverse engineer it, is to establish what Chief uses as the Concrete Cover (the amount of concrete outside of the "longitudinally" placed rebar).  Is there a way to access the width and height of the concrete cover values of a beam?

 

For the record, I have created macros to calculate this automatically using a known value for the concrete cover but now I have to set the Chief stirrup count to zero so I can do what I desire automatically...just seems to be something simple that Chief could do for us.  One work around which I am looking at is setting the stirrup_count as the spacing value and just using that in my macro.

 

Perhaps I'm missing something obvious...or not so obvious.

 

Any takers for comments?  Thanks in advance.

 

Ivan

 

 

[Renerabbitt]

51 minutes ago, IvanCyr said:

Is there a known method to make this automatic

yes, in X17 we have framing member defaults which have an OIP. build your macros and place in the OIP or in components depending on what you are reporting to, schedule or material list.
Regarding everything else, you have all the info that we have if you've managed to use the object properties macro in TMM, it's just a matter of working with the data thats there to come up with your script(s)

[mthd97]

Hey @Renerabbitt, Can you please tell us what is an OIP and a TMM is so we can follow. I think your method would have to suffice for CA at present ?

 

Hey @IvanCyr, Very good question, I have done these calculations manually and then entered the calculations into my own xl spread sheet. It certainly would be great to have it calculated automatically in CA.
 

Accurate Automatic Reinforcement Calculations in CA would be the holy grail inside CAD software. You would probably need to be able to draw stirrups in a cad detail and have them become 3D objects that can be entered into the Materials List. As you know stirrups have curves in the corners and overlaps and spacings and they also have standard purchase lengths. The same can be true for certain types of deformed reinforcement bars that overlap. Maybe a suggestion for a future version of CA ?

I don’t know what specialist reinforcement cad software does but we could probably learn from them maybe ?

 

Let’s see what others have to say ?