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Steel Design Output Indicates a Slenderness Failure

Applies To

Product(s): STAAD.Pro

Version(s): All

Environment: N/A

Area: American Steel Design

Subarea: Slenderness Failure

Original Author: Bentley Technical Support Group

The steel design output indicates a slenderness failure (KL/r exceeds allowable). Why? The axial force on the member is very
small.

The code has requirements which say that the KL/r ratios for a member should not exceed certain allowable limits. For members
subjected to tensile forces, the code suggests one limit, and for members subjected to compressive forces, there is another limit.

In most codes, this is the first check STAAD does on a member. If the member fails the check, no further calculations are done for that
member.

The code does not offer any guidelines on what must be the minimum magnitude of the axial force for the member to become a
candidate for this check and so STAAD performs these checks by default irrespective for the magnitude of force in the member. It only
looks at the sign of the force to determine if it is a tensile force or compressive force.

In STAAD, two parameters are available - one called MAIN and another called TMAIN if you wish to bypass this check (TMAIN is
available for some codes only). Please refer to the list of Design Parameters for the code you are using to check how these two
parameters can be set to bypass the slenderness checks as these differ from code to code. For example for the AISC codes, MAIN can
be set to 1 to bypass the slenderness check in compression and TMAIN can be set to 1 to bypass the slenderness check in tension. For
IS 800 2007 code on the other hand, these would have to be set to -1 for the respective checks to be bypassed.

bypass slenderness check LRFD AISC ASD slenderness AISC 360 MAIN TMAIN

slenderness failure

Created by Steve Crabtree

1 of 2 10/5/2020, 12:02 PM
Steel Design Output Indicates a Slenderness Failure - RAM | STAAD | OpenTower Wiki - RAM... https://communities.bentley.com/products/ram-staad/w/structural_analysis_and_design__wiki/...

When: Tue, Jun 14 2016 3:05 PM

Last revision by Sye

When: Tue, Dec 4 2018 2:20 PM
Revisions: 10
Comments: 0

2 of 2 10/5/2020, 12:02 PM