
In order to address the automatic design towards designs that respect his/her needs, the user of CSE Reader must set his/her own design criteria.
This is done accessing the dialog of the previous picture by the command Automation-Automatic Design-Set.
The design criteria allow the following choices.
- Saving one’s own criteria to a file that may be later re-opened.
- Choose a standard (EC3/NTC: NORM-EC3 o AISC-LRFD: NORM-AISC)
- Set a maximum utilisation lower than 1. In this case the designs will be more on the safe side. If for example a 0.8 value is set, the designs will not have any component with utilisation higher than 0.8.
- Bolts:
- You can choose the class and type of the bolts (European or American)
- You can set a diameter-interval or some diameters in particular (from 1 to 4) and the designs will only use those.
- For some joint-types you can set the distance to the TOS (Top Of Steel) of the topmost bolt.
- You can set the minimum edge-distance (default 1.5 times the hole-diameter).
- You can set the minimum distance between rows and columns (default 3 times the hole-diameter).
- You can set the maximum wished number of rows and columns (if zero, no limit).
- Welds:
- You can set the minimum thickness, the maximum thickness and a size-increment. By “thickness” we mean the weld leg, NOT the throat thickness.
- For AISC standard, that asks for it, the weld-strength.
- Plates:
- You can set a minimum thickness and a maximum thickness (in the active unit of measurement) and a size-increment. These choices affect the number of possible designs.
- You can provide instructions about the material, that may be chosen brand-new, or may be that of the master or slave members.
- Foundation or wall:
- You can set the concrete strength class.
- Joint-types:
- It is possible to exclude from the search the joints having the keyword WELDED (welded-joints) or BOLTED (bolted-joints). Usually the keyword WELDED is assigned to joints that have no bolting. In the joints with keyword BOLTED there may be some welding (e.g. FIN PLATES).
- It is also possible to exclude the joints that have some keywords or that have some mark. You can set a string in which the words are separated by “;” without blanks. For example “cE1;cE2;Be1”.
- Assume that 10 joint-types are geometrically applicable to the joint at hand, without keeping into account this request.
- If all these joint-types have at least one of the keywords identical to at least one of the keyword specified, or the mark, the exclusion cannot work, as all would be discarded; nor the inclusion can work, as all would be considered (homogeneous situation, not mixed).
- Let us instead assume that 4 parameterizations have at least one of the keywords of the string (cE1, cE2 o Be1) or the mark. If they are excluded (“exclude” radio-button) only the other 6 will remain. If they are included (“include only” radio-button) only those 4 will remain (mixed situation).
- If I do not want the joint of the type Be1, I will add also this keyword to the exclusion string.
- If instead for the beam-to-beam joints I want only joints of type Be1 or BE1, I will write “Be1;BE1” in the inclusion string (and no other mark or keyword referring to beam-to-beam joints).
- Type of the Gusset Plate:
- This option has an effect on the vertical bracing joint-types (VG1, VG2, VW1, VW2). UFM stands for uniform force method. See the page referring to the vertical bracings for further details and pictures.
- Strategy:
- The first possible strategy is a quick one: it chooses the first design passing all the checks (“fisrt ok parameterization”).
- Instead it is possible to choose a minimum cost design, that will examine all the possible designs coherent with the design criteria chosen, and that pass all the checks, and will pick the one (unique) having the minimum fabrication cost. The fabrication cost is defined by a metric that is chosen by the user using the command Automation-Cost-Define Metric. This option implies a 50% increase of cost and it is suggested only for nodes that repeat many times in the structure.