Minimum Design Forces & Rounding Increment

To aid efficiency and rationalization of design, comprehensive new settings are added giving the engineer control and flexibility of Design forces; both those considered by checks within the program and reported and exported. As shown in the picture below, the new settings are added to the “Design Forces” page of Design Settings. Using these the engineer can now control minimum values considered and set optional rounding increments for both Brace and Beam End Forces and Foundation reactions.

This feature applies to all Head Codes and note that it has no impact on forces considered in member design.
These settings impact the values considered/ reported in the following checks and areas:
- Brace & Beam End Forces:
  - Connection Resistance Checks for both Beams and Braces.
  - Brace/ Member End Forces Report Items and Beam End Forces Drawing.
  - Forces populated to Connections (Beam to Beam, Beam to Column and General) - both those designed by/ exported to Tekla Connection Design (TCD) and exported to IDEA Statica.
- Foundation Reactions:
  - Foundation Reaction Report Items and Drawing.
  - Forces populated to Connections (Base Plate and General) - both those designed by/ exported to Tekla Connection Design (TCD) and exported to IDEA Statica.
Minimum Design Force - this replaces the force from analysis where it is the greater - e.g. if for the beam connection resistance checks to consider a minimum shear value of 75 kN, enter this value in the Beam End Forces > Major Axis Shear Force box, and so on.
- When the Minimum value is used, a note to this effect is displayed in the row for that check in the Tabulated Data Connection Resistance check table and associated report item.
Rounding Increment - separate rounding increment options are available for Brace/Beam forces and Foundation Reactions for Force and Moment.
- When enabled, the force value from analysis is rounded up to the next value of the increment considering the sign of the force - e.g. for a force increment of 5.0 kN; a force of 10.438 kN will be rounded to 15.0 kN; a force of -6.224 kN will be rounded to -10.0 kN...and so on.
- Note that the Moment increment applies to both major and minor axis moments but not torsion (M_x) which is not rounded.