Seismosoft | Earthquake Engineering Solutions

I would like to ask how shear strength provided by transverse reinforcment (tie legs in each direction) in concrete elements is accounted in the analysis. Also, does the confinement factor account just for confinement or for shear strength as well? Many thanks in advance!

Hi,
I can tell you that the fibre elements currently available in SeismoStruct do not model/compute shear deformation/strength. Then, as stated in the Help System, the confinement factor is simply used to scale up the stress-strain relationship throughout the entire strain range.
Federica

Thank you for your answer! So does this means that when assessing an existing structure seismostruct just looks the moment capacity of the elements and not their shear strength? What about if the element has failed in shear before the full moment capacity of the element is achieved?

In that case, first of all you have to calculate "by hand" the shear strength for each element in your model, then you have to define a "Performance Criterion" in which you assign the computed value. Hence, by using this kind of criterion you can control when the shear demand of a frame element exceeds the capacity (you have also the possibility to stop the analysis). For details, please refer to the Help System -> Performance Criteria

Fbianchi thank you very much!