RAM Structural System Ideas

Welcome to the RAM Structural System Ideas portal. The purpose of this site is to post ideas for enhancements and new features. We value your feedback and our team regularly reviews your suggestions for consideration in future releases.

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Status Future consideration
Created by Guest
Created on Nov 13, 2024

RELATED IDEAS

Unbalanced Snow Loads

I would love to see expanded snow loading capabilities that let you apply different load distributions that are enveloped for design. Specifically for gable roof structures, ASCE 7 requires that you apply a "balanced" load (uniform across the whole roof) and two "unbalanced" load cases (higher drift loads on each side of the ridge). All 3 of these cases should be considered separately, but there is currently no way to use more than one load pattern for design.


Designing for the uniform pattern is under-conservative. Applying the unbalanced load case to both sides of the ridge at the same time would be accurate for the roof beams, but is overly conservative for the girder at the ridge and the columns. The only work around at this point seems to be creating separate models with different loading and then enveloping the results, which is pretty inefficient.

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  • Admin
    Seth Guthrie
    Reply
    |     Nov 15, 2024

    Thanks, this has come up a few times before. Our first step, hopefully for version 2025, will be the distinction of snow loads from roof live loads and the proper factoring of those loads when combined with D and other L loads. After that we can look at custom rules for load patterning of Snow.