History of STAAD

STAAD or (STAAD.Pro) is a structural analysis and design computer program originally

developed by Research Engineers International at Yorba Linda, CA in year 1997. In late 2005,
Research Engineers International was bought by Bentley Systems.
An older version called Staad-III for windows is used by Iowa State University for
educational purposes for civil and structural engineers. Initially it was used for DOS-Window
system. The commercial version STAAD.Pro is one of the most widely used structural analysis
and design software. It supports several steel, concrete and timber design codes. It can make use
of various forms of analysis from the traditional 1st order static analysis, 2nd order pdelta analysis, geometric nonlinear analysis or a buckling analysis. It can also make use of
various forms of dynamic analysis from modal extraction to time history and response spectrum
analysis. In recent years it has become part of integrated structural analysis and design solutions
mainly using an exposed API called OpenSTAAD to access and drive the program using a VB
macro system included in the application or other by including OpenSTAAD functionality in
applications that themselves include suitable programmable macro systems. Additionally
STAAD.Pro has added direct links to applications such as RAM Connection and
STAAD.Foundation to provide engineers working with those applications which handle design
post processing not handled by STAAD.Pro itself. Another form of integration supported by
STAAD.Pro is the analysis schema of the CIMsteel Integration Standard, version 2 commonly
known as CIS/2 and used by a number modelling and analysis applications.

What is STAAD?

STAAD.Pro is the professional's choice for steel, concrete, timber, aluminum and coldformed steel design of low and high-rise buildings, culverts, petrochemical plants, tunnels,
bridges, piles and much more. STAAD.Pro is the premier FEM analysis and design tool for any
type of project including towers, culverts, plants, bridges, stadiums, and marine structures. With
an array of advanced analysis capabilities including linear static, response spectra, time history,
cable, and pushover and non-linear analyses, STAAD.Pro provides your engineering team with a
scalable solution that will meet the demands of your project every time. STAAD.Pro will
eliminate the countless man-hours required to properly load your structure by automating the
forces caused by wind, earthquakes, snow, or vehicles. In addition, no matter what material you
are using or what country you are designing your structure in, STAAD.Pro can easily
accommodate your design and loading requirements, including US, European (including the
Eurocodes), Nordic, Indian, and Asian codes; even special codes like AASHTO, ASCE 52, IBC
and the US aluminum code can be catered to. With an unparalleled quality assurance program,
open architecture for customization, and a 25-year track record including such projects as the
MCI Stadium in Washington DC, Wimbledon Court No1 in Europe, and the tallest transmission
tower in Asia, STAAD.Pro is the perfect workhorse for your design firm.

Advantages of STAAD

Extremely Flexible Modeling Environment

How easy is it to use and learn STAAD.Pro? STAAD has an intuitive graphical environment and
in a recent survey, 80 percent of our customers learned how to use it in under two hours. We
revolutionized the concurrent use of spreadsheets, an AutoCAD-like graphical modeler, and a
text-based input language editor. With over 40 step-by-step movie tutorials and hundreds of
examples and verification problems, even a novice computer user can become productive in a
matter of days. Along with our movie tutorials, we also include an online help documentation
that provides examples and explanations on hundreds of topics. In addition, we offer an
unparalleled certified training program as well as on-site and in-house trainings.

Broad Spectra of Design Codes

Are you tired of using one software to do your modeling, another one for your steel design, and
yet another one to design your concrete beams, slabs, and foundations? Since the 1980s,
STAAD.Pro has encompassed concrete and steel design, making it a true one-stop-shop
structural environment. STAAD.Pro is used by companies like Jacobs, Parsons, and
URS/Greiner who create some of the largest steel plants in the world, while companies like
CH2M HILL, Montgomery Watson Harza, and Bechtel design some of the most complex
concrete tanks, clarifiers, and mats worldwide. And companies like BE & K in Alabama and
Kellogg Brown and Root in Houston utilize STAAD.Pro to optimize their structures consisting
of both steel and concrete. We even support all current and historical codes including ASD,
LRFD (2nd and 3rd Editions), ACI 318 (1995, 1999 and 2002), UBC (1985, 1994, 1997), IBC
(2000 and 2003) and ASCE 7 (1995, 2002, 2005). STAAD.Pro will optimize your steel
structures with full control of parameters like drift, deflection, depth, etc and calculate the
reinforcement for your concrete columns, beams, slabs and even shear walls.

International Best Seller

Since its introduction into the market in 1981, STAAD was thrown onto the international scene
with its implementation of the British codes. Currently, we support over 70 international codes
and approximately 20 US codes. Forty-seven out of the top 50 ENR companies actively use
STAAD.Pro in their offices worldwide. We have global offices staffed with engineers that

develop, maintain, and support STAAD.Pro in their respective local regions.

STAAD.Pro supports sevena languages (English, Spanish, French, German, Chinese, Japanese
and Russian) through an engineering staff of over 80 engineers (Masters, PhDs, PEs). No other
company has nearly half the staff supporting their products.

Interoperability and Open Architecture

Unlike most structural software, STAAD.Pro can be customized by you to exactly fit your design
needs. STAAD.Pro is developed on an open architecture called OpenSTAAD. All of the
functions related to input or output are available to you, such as GetMaximumBendingMoment
or AddUniformLoad. We also include a parametric library of pre-built commonly used structures
like trusses, buildings, mats, etc. that can be customized by your company for modeling
repetitive structures. You can even add your own templates! With OpenSTAAD, you can
automatically link output from your model to Excel or MathCAD. When the model changes,
your Excel routine does as well! In addition, STAAD.Pro has an embedded VBA (Visual Basic
for Applications) editor which enables you to write your own design, loading, or post-processing
routines directly in the STAAD environment. Users have written routines that performed
alternate span loading, renumbered members, created sub-structures that were highly repetitive,
and have even designed an octagonal base plate.

Covering All Aspects of Structural Engineering

STAAD.Pro is a solution for all types of structure and includes tools designed to aid specific
structural engineering tasks. For example, for the bridge engineer, STAAD.beava incorporates a
powerful influence surface generator to assist in locating vehicles for maximum effects. The
Section Wizard can be used to calculate properties for non-standard sections. Finite element
modeling is an art which requires careful consideration, including the quality of meshes being
created. The Advanced Mesher provides this functionality and allows visual checks on the
quality. In addition, STAAD.Pro works in conjunction with programs such as
STAAD.foundation, which allows foundations to be designed, STAAD.offshore, which allows
for design of offshore structures, RAM Concept, for concrete slab design including posttensioning, Bentley REBAR for reinforcing detailing, Bentley AutoPIPE, for calculation of pipe
stresses, Bentley Structural for drawing production and BIM Solution, and RAM Connection, for
steel connection design. Whether you're engineering bridges, plants, or pipes, STAAD.Pro will
streamline your efforts, ensuring success.

Quality Assurance
STAAD.Pro is the only software that has gone through ISO 9001 certification and has passed the
stringent software validation requirements of the nuclear industry (10CFR Part 50, 10CFR 21
and ASME NQA-1-2000). Every year, we are audited by companies like Entergy, Bechtel Power,
ProtoPower, Altran Corporation, who exhaustively review our bug reporting procedures and our
Quality Assurance (QA) process.

Extremely Scalable
STAAD.Pro is best known for its accurate 3D linear static and P-delta analysis of multi-material
structures. But did you know that the most powerful and widely used facets of STAAD.Pro are
its soil-structure interaction, push-over and dynamic analyses? More engineers today are facing
challenging structural problems including blast analysis, plastic pushover, fire propagation,
earthquakes and even tsunamis. Seismic codes around the world (IBC, NBCC, IS1893, NTC,
EC8) are requiring more accurate modeling of flexible diaphragms and identification of plastic
hinges (per FEMA 356/440). With STAAD.Pro, there is no need to use multiple software
programs to check the integrity of your structure under different conditions. In one run, you can
subject your structure to linear, dynamic, and non-linear conditions. STAAD.Pro can handle the
smallest of truss structures to any size model. Element types include second and third beam/truss,
3- and 4-nodes plates, 8-noded solid/bricks, physical members, curvilinear beams, surface
objects for shear walls and much more.
In addition, with the acquisition of STARDYNE line of products (used on the Apollo space
mission as well as companies like Rocketdyne, Boeing, Siemens) and incorporated its nonlinear
static, dynamic, buckling, and steady-state routines into STAAD. Our solution times have been
benchmarked by universities all over the world against our competitors and year after year, we
find that STAAD.Proconsistently posts the fastest time. STAAD.Pro is well equipped to handle
complex solutions. You want to feel confident that the product you are using today will fit your
needs in the future so you don't have to reinvest and retrain on a new platform down the line.

Reports and Documentation

STAAD.Pro has one of the most powerful, and customizable, and high quality reports available
so that you are able to provide your clients and engineers with exactly the information that is
required, whether it is a two page summary of pictures exactly as seen onscreen or complete,
fully detailed reports. If these need to be enhanced further then they can be exported directly into
Microsoft Word. Extracting data from the model such as the largest node displacement at a

specific node becomes easy using an inbuilt Advanced Query, SQL tool. For those that wish to
create contract drawings, this becomes possible as STAAD.Pro models can be linked to Bentley
Structural.

Technical Support by Structural Engineers

We want our users to find the easiest way to get their problems solved. STAAD.Pro offers a
dynamic website with new tips and tricks and a discussion board for STAAD users around the
world. Our FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) page has over 1500 questions ranging from how
to model a laterally loaded pile to the differences between plate and solid elements. We update
the FAQ site consistently and all new postings are automatically e-mailed to all subscribers. Our
discussion board is frequented by over 1000 engineers every month and monitored by
Bentley/REI staff on a daily basis. With over 14 full-time support personnel, Bentley can provide
24/7 support no matter where you are in the world.

Training
STAAD.Pro is fully compliant with industry standards for interoperability like CIS/2 which
enables companies to easily send our data upstream or downstream to other applications in their
design workflow that support this format. For example, this allows for integration with steel
detailing software such as Xsteel and SDS2. In addition, STAAD.Pro is integrated with other
industry leading products like ProSteel, FrameWorks Plus, LARSA 4D, and Structural Desktop.
Other formats like VRML help engineers to walk through a STAAD.Pro model within Internet
Explorer without having STAAD.Pro loaded on their computer.

STAAD Overview

A STRUCTURE can be defined as an assemblage of elements. STAAD is capable of

analyzing and designing structures consisting of both frame, and Finite elements. Almost any
type of structure can be analyzed by STAAD.
Frame elements Beam elements 2 nodes
Finite elements
1.) Plate 3 or 4 nodes
2.) Solid 4 to 8 nodes
In case of STAAD
Node becomes Joint
it has a number and xyz coordinates
Beam becomes Member it has a number and nodes at its ends
Plate becomes Element it has a number and node at its corners
TYPES OF STRUCTURE
A TRUSS structure consists of truss members which can have only axial member forces
and no bending in the members. A PLANE structure is bound by a global X-Y coordinate system
with loads in the same plane. A SPACE structure, which is a three dimensional framed structure
with loads applied in any plane, is the most general. A FLOOR structure is a two or three
dimensional structure having no horizontal (global X or Z) movement of the structure [FX, FZ &
MY are restrained at every joint]. The floor framing (in global X-Z plane) of a building is an
ideal example of a FLOOR structure. Columns can also be modelled with the floor in a FLOOR
structure as long as the structure has no horizontal loading. If there is any horizontal load, it must
be analyzed as a SPACE structure.
MODEL GENERATION
There are basically 3 methods of generating a model: Snap node method, Coordinate
method and Copy paste method. Out of these three methods most commonly used is copy paste
method. By using these three methods a structure of any geometry can be created STAAD.Pro
also contains a command wizard which is its library of structures such as frames , trusses are
present which can be merged with the STAAD.Pro model
ASSIGNING LOADS
Any structure is subjected to basically these types of loads1. Dead load
2. Live Load
Dead load includes the self-weight of the structure while live load consists of
superimposed load. In addition to a structure is also subjected to wind and seismic or earthquake

forces. While designing a structure subjected to wind and earthquake forces we also have to
provide definitions along with various load cases.

Macros and Open STAAD

Foundation

Buckling Analysis

STAAD Features
Model Generation

Interactive Menu-driven Model Generation with simultaneous 3D display.

2Dand 3D Graphic Generation using rectangular or polar coordinate systems.

Segments of repetitive geometry may be used to generate complex structural

models.

Generate, Copy, Repeat, Mirror, Pivot, etc. or quick and easy geometry
generation.

Quick/easy mesh generation.

Comprehensive graphics editing.

Graphical Specification and Display of Properties, Loadings, Supports,

Orientations.

Import AutoCAD DXF files.

Access to Text Editor.

Model Verification

2D/3D drawings on screen as well as on plotter/printer.

Full 3D shapes for Frames, Elements.

Sectional views or views with listed members only.

Isometric or any rotations for full 3D viewing.

Display of Properties, Loadings, Supports, Orientations, Joint/Member

numbering, Dimensions, Hidden line removed, etc.

Plot manipulation according to the size, rotation, viewing origin and distance.

Static Analysis

2D/3D Analysis based on state-of-the-art Matrix method to handle extremely

large job.

Beam, Truss, Tapered Beam, Shell/Plate Bending/Plane Stress.

Full/Partial Moment Releases.

Member Offset Specification.

Fixed, Pinned and Spring Supports with Releases. Also inclined Supports.

Automatic Spring Support Generator.

Linear, P-Delta Analysis, Non-Linear Analysis with automatic load and

stiffness correction. Multiple Analyses within same run.

Active/Inactive Members for Load-Dependent structures.

Tension-only members and compression-only members, Multi-linear spring

supports.

CIMSTEEL Interface.

Dynamic / Sesmic Analysis

Mass modeling, Extraction of Frequency and Mode shapes.

Response Spectrum, Time History Analysis.

Modal Damping Ratio for Individual Models.

Harmonic Load Generator.

Combination of Dynamic forces with Static loading for subsequent design.

Secondary Analysis

Forces and Displacements at sections between nodes.

Maximum and Minimum force Envelopes.

Load Types and Load Generation

Loading for Joints, Members/Elements including Concentrated, Uniform, Linear,

Trapezoidal, Temperature, Strain, Support Displacement, Prestressed and Fixed-end
Loads.

Global, Local and Projected Loading Directions.

Uniform or varying Element Pressure Loading on entire or selected portion of

elements.

Floor/Area Load converts load-per-area to member loads based on one-way or twoway actions.

Automatic Moving Load Generation as per standard AASHTO or user-defined

loading.

UBC 1997.AIJ/IS 1893/Cypriot Seismic Load Generation.

Automatic Wind Load Generation.

Finite Element Capabilities

Accurate and numerically Efficient Plate/Shell Element incorporating out-of-plane

shear and in-plane rotation.

Automatic Element Mesh Generation.

Comprehensive Element Stress Output including in-plane stresses, out-of-plane shear,

bending and principal stresses at nodal as well as user specified points.

Steel Design

Built-in steel tables including AISC, Australian, British, Canadian, Chinese, European,
Indian, Japanese, Korean, Russian, and South African. Shapes include I-Beam with or
without cover plates, Channels, Angles, Double Angles,/Channels, Pipes and Tubes.

User-specified Design Parameters to customize design.

Code Check, Member selection and Optimised Member Selection consisting of

Analysis/Design cycles.

Design codes include AISC (ASD and LRFD), AASHTO. Optional codes include
ASCE52, BS5400, BS5950, Canadian, Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Indian
and Scandinavian.

Weld deign for all steel shapes.

Concrete Design

Design of Concrete Beam/Column/Slab/Footing as per all major international codes

Numerical and Graphical Design Outputs with complete reinforcement details.

IS 456-2000 for RCC design implemented.

RC detailer as per IS 456-2000 has been implemented which has given a new
dimension to RCC design never witnessed in STAAD before.

Timber Design

Code Check/Selection as per AITC Code.

Result Verification

Result verification and display.

Deflected and Mode Shapes based on Joint/Section Displacement for user-specified

loading or mode shape number.

Bending Moment and Shear force diagrams of individual members as well as the
entire structure.

User-controlled Scale factors for Deflected or Mode shapes.

orce/Moment Envelope Plots as max/min for all loads.

Stress contour plots.

Code Performance Plots for Steel Design.

Powerful on-line Query for analysis/design results.

Animation of Deflected/Mode shapes, Stress Contours.