revit structural analysis

[Anonymous]

I work for a structural engineering firm who specializes in residential wood framing design.  We are considering Revit but need to know if it can intuitively calculate structural loading.  In others words if we model a house will it tell us where to place beams & headers to support second floors and roofs and size these members as well?  We would also like to be able to input various live and dead loads and have the sizing update accordingly.  Can Revit perform these actions or are there any plug ins or software that can work within revit that will perform these actions?  Thank you.

[ennujozlagam]

@Anonymous hello, Revit program has also a limitations cannot perform everything. you can try to check it here <<LINK>>. thanks

[renanrr3]

Hello chrishart76MEEG4,

So, I will try to help you by answering your questions as best as I can:

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In others words if we model a house will it tell us where to place beams & headers to support second floors and roofs and size these members as well?  

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As far as I know, Revit does not do that. If I understand correctly your question, actually I do not know any structural software that could tell you where to place beams or headers. This task is up to the engineer, who informs the software about the structural elements locations, with their analytical properties and loads information, to get from the software the structural analysis result and therefore being able to design such elements, i.e., size them.

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We would also like to be able to input various live and dead loads and have the sizing update accordingly.  Can Revit perform these actions or are there any plug ins or software that can work within revit that will perform these actions?  Thank you.

Revit has a tool for applying loads in the analytical model, with pretty complete functionalities that we see in common structural analysis programs. But... it does not analyze it itself. The workflow in Revit is model as much of the analytical model as possible, including geometry, boundary conditions, loads, element releases, etc., and then sending it to a structural analysis application to do the maths and return with either the analysis results, the correct dimension if the the application can do the design, or both.

You can check more about structural analysis and design in this link. There are also many structural software developers that have add-ins for Revit to allow interoperability with their software, such as Tekla, Sofstik, CSI. You just have to choose your preferred software and check how you can interface it with Revit.

Best regards