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.
You have 3 options for providing feedback:
Vote for an existing Idea. The popularity of an Idea helps us understand its importance to our users.
Comment on an existing Idea. We want to hear your unique point of view.
Add a new Idea. If no existing Idea describes what you would like, add a new one!
When you Vote, Comment, or Add an idea you will also be subscribed to that Idea and will receive status updates. Please note that we may merge or rename Ideas for clarity. Thank you for your support and feedback, it is always appreciated!
Seth, the last mass timber building we did was pretty complex. We ended up modeling it kinda-sorta in RSS and kinda-sorta in Elements. It was a mix of post-and-beam construction with glulam braces and CLT shear walls. Needless to say, nothing really handles that exactly (Dlubal being the closest we've found, but kinda painful to use). RAM Elements handled most of our glulam gravity analysis needs, but it would've been nice to be able to take advantage of the rigid and pseudo-flexible diaphragm modeling of RSS with a "generic" wood model to do an envelope lateral load distribution as recommended in SDPWS (with maybe some semi-rigid diaphragms with modified-stiffnesses to simulate orthotropic CLT floors) as a cross check. I think the ease of diaphragm modeling and the auto-load generation are 2 big advantage of RSS over Elements right now that incentivize trying to use it for wood.
Mass timber components, such as one-way slabs, glulam beams and columns, and shear walls would be great, but what I'm really looking for is a way to analyze and design typical mixed-material buildings, such as light-framed podium structures which might have wood trusses, wood beams, and wood posts. We can do this with "fake" members to represent the wood components now, but it would be great if we could go ahead and perform design of those components right within the program. Ram SS is well-suited for this because we can also perform load run-downs and integration with Concept for transfer slab design.
I for one would prefer mass timber over sawn. We are getting more and more pressure to include mass timber in projects for sustainability reasons and having it integrated into the main whole building solution would be helpful.
Are you looking for mass timber analysis and design or simple sawn lumber design? We have the latter in Ram Elements today, and I think Ram Elements is the better fit for wood structures that commonly have trusses, ridge beams and other geometry that does not fit well in RAM SS.