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Welded tapered portal frames

Portal frames may be one of the most commonly used structural types in steel halls, but that doesn’t mean designing them is always straightforward. Striving for optimal cross-sections, engineers often turn to welded, tapered members, but they frequently face the challenge of designing these efficiently while navigating vague or insufficient guidance from standards. The complexity arises from the unique behavior of such frames, typically involving Class 4 cross-sections, irregular support conditions, and moment-resisting frame corners, all of which together pose significant challenges in both analysis and design.

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Consteel provides you with the right set of tools to deepen your understanding of these seemingly routine tasks and elevate your designs.

With its advanced analysis and design features, Our software enables engineers to seamlessly optimize tapered members and rigid frame corners, ensuring both structural integrity and mechanical precision.

Specific Feature Solutions for welded tapered portal frames in Consteel

Easy modeling of nonunifrom members – Tapered members

In Consteel, the tapered members are easy to define with just a few clicks and with the help of realistic visulalisation, despite of the numerous options provided for geometry. Member eccentricities due to placement options are recognized and considered automatically during analysis, as well as the special calculation method serving the correct transfer of warping between the finite elements of different heights.

Easy modeling of plated girders – Superbeam

Considering shear and rotational restraints provided by the various types of sheeting is unavoidable during cold-formed purlin design. In Consteel, the definition of these restraints is practical for everyday use and supplemented with an automatically applied special purlin design mode of analysis and design calculations. As purlins can be modelled as integrated parts of the structural model, their restraining effect to the main structure can also be considered.

Exact analysis of continuous frame corner regions

Corner zones have usually significantly different behavior than the connected beam members. Since these zones are very short, the behavior is influenced dominantly by the shear effect. Frame corner regions are semi-automatically recognised in Consteel and specific methods are applied to them during analyis and design with the consideration of kinematic constraint elements between the 7. DOF displacements of the neighbouring members (warping transfer) according to the chosen frame corner topology.

Immersive visualization of the true structural behavior

The key uniqueness of Consteel lies in its ability to model real structural behavior as accurately as possible, building automation and unique design procedures upon this foundation.
A crucial element of this approach is the immersive visualization, which enables a realistic representation of the deformations associated with the actual structural behavior—whether they result from applied loads or buckling shapes.
This visualization goes beyond conventional displacement components by also incorporating warping and other local deformations of structural elements, making the representation smoother and more realistic. It almost depicts the structure as if the beams and plates were analyzed using shell models.
Why is this important?
Because a visually striking and intuitive representation conveys the structural behavior far more effectively than even multiple pages of calculations or tables.

Automatic buckling design based on the ‘General Method’

General Method is the smartest way of stability design, described in EN 1993-1-1. It is applicable for any complex cases of out-of-plane buckling problems (flexural, torsional, and lateral-torsional buckling, and any interactions of these) with arbitrary members, loading and support conditions. Based on the global buckling and sensitivity analysis, it provides a comprehensive and automatic solution for stability design.

ReferenceS by OUR users

Warehouse building in Dorohoi

Hangar for Sabadell airport

TRUSTED EXPERIENCE

ConSteel Solutions Ltd. is a software developer company specialized in structural analysis and design for steel, composite structures with more than 25 years of experience in steel design.

Pioneer innovations

We continuously research and implement the most modern ways of steel design based on high-level, integrated numerical analysis. We are also seriously dealing with design issues outside of the standard methods in order to offer practical solutions for the engineers in these complex fields as well.

Unparalleled support

With Consteel, you benefit from expert local support and valuable guidance at every stage, provided by our highly regarded and experienced support team. We’re proud that our users are satisfied with the support they receive.

knowledge behind consteel

Example ModelS

Design a pre-engineered Metal Building

Did you know that you can use Consteel to design a pre-engineered Metal Building with all its unique characteristics, including web-tapered welded members, the interaction of primary and secondary structural elements, flange braces, shear and rotational stabilization effect provided by wall and roof sheeting? 

Download the example model and try it!

Connected categories

What can you do with Consteel?

Select a category from the building types

Metal buildings/Pre-engineered buildings
Halls and hangars
More building types

What can you do with Consteel?

Select a category from the design problems

Non-uniform members
More design problems