Axial Forces Calculation Excel Template | Howe Truss - SD1 Termwork

  Calculating the axial forces can be an absolute mess, but if you'd done it a few times you might have noticed that it follows a regular pattern. This pattern makes it easy to be coded and in a few minutes. For many of such works or the so-called group projects, I prefer having a custom template on Excel to get my jobs done rather than depending on someone else to do it.

Automation is Always Better than Delegation#GroupProjects

— Shadaab Sayyed (@sayyedshaddy) October 10, 2017

 So during the third year of my Civil Engineering, we had a group project to design a steel truss and it was an absolute pain to calculate the parameters, most of them were repetitive in nature so as a solution I made an excel template and then just by changing a few values I was able to get the design completed. Once my custom template or what I call the Microsoftware was ready, I could solve the design for others in a few minute as well. I'd added a few logical checks which enable the extreme scrutiny of design parameters so that there could be a lot of material savings.

So here is a part of the templates:

Axial Force Calculation for Howe Truss with 5 panels and a span of 16 meters

 This was a spreadsheet I made after solving a few joint analysis problems and found the pattern that could be automated, later I used the same to solve the wind loads and live loads as well. So it is clear that by coding once you can use it multiple times and get your works done in a faster and efficient way.

Axial Force Calculation Spreadsheet Preview

Click Here To Download the Spreadsheet

Axial Force Calculation Spreadsheet Preview

How to Use the Spreadsheet

• Edits to the Spreadsheet are disabled.
• Enter the Nodal Loads that you'd calculated by the IS code Method in the fields specified.
• Feed in the slope or the angle of inclination in the field as specified.
• Scroll down to edit the angles formed at the different joints and modify if required.
• By just feeding in the above mentioned values the cells will update with the correct values.
• C represents compression and T represents tension in the members, the allocation of compression and tensions are to be done manually, ( I didn't had time to do that, neither the university cooperated to allow me to print the termwork. I had to write it by hand :-( , Yours might be a lucky chance! )

That settles it!

Thanks for reading

A post shared by Er. Shadaab SAYYED | شاداب سيد (@sayyedshadaab) on Oct 7, 2017 at 5:56am PDT