Hi,
EN 1993-1-8 weld requirements requires no evaluation/check if there's full penetration weld between beam-beam joint.
however, in real life full penetration welds are quite expensive and we could go with partial penetration+Fillet welds, but to evaluate these requires beam end forces and Formulae based on EN 1993-1-8 and is quite time consuming.
if we could implement it in the software itself, just by providing some inputs such as flange/brace weld sizes and then get the output in the form of weld utilizations, that would be really great.
I know other similar beam softwares in collaboration with ANSYS are already implementing such calculations.
Does SACS have plan to implement them anytime soon?
We have no current plans to implement partial penetration fillet welds according to Eurocode 1993-1-8 (2005). Are you interested in the Directional method according to 4.5.3.2(6) or the Simplified method according to 4.5.3.3. It seems to me that you would need to use a finite element mesh of the connection to calculate the stresses in the fillet weld for the Directional method so I think the Simplified method would be the only practically feasible solution for SACS. Even that does not address how one would calculate the design weld force per unit length. We would need some way to associate nominal forces in the connection to the weld force which again would most likely require a finite element analysis.
If we implemented the Simplified method, would you want to manually assign "fu", "Beta_w", and "a" values for individual joints, braces, and/or cans? And would you want to manually define a weld force factor to convert nominal beam forces into the design weld force?