A new version of the application, version 5.2 has just been released.
Some materials to American Concrete Institute code ACI-318-14 have been added to the automatic material description facilities. The facilities for ACI-318-14-May remain although these facilities were created before the final version of ACI-318-14 was available.
Improvements have been made to the Computation Progress Dialog. A problem with the standard close button has been fixed.
Improvements have been made to the table edit dialogs. (Stress/strain table, Shape table and Points table).
I bought today this program but the program is not updating to version 5.2 (I click “Update” in the App Store but it doesn’t do anything).
More importantly, there is a problem using SI units in a “Point Component” because if the cross-sectional area or diameter are typed in with the units that appears as default (mm2 and mm, respectively), when you click in Load cases -> Displays, the bars appears to be too big as if the values that you should have typed in where in cm2 and cm, instead of mm2 and mm.
Also, when working in SI units and I compute the load case for ultimate bending (the reason I bought this software) and click “Compute ultimate bending moments” the iteration finish but I don’t get any moment values (they appear as zeros).
Please help me with this as soon as you can. If you want to, I can send you my XSF file.
Thank you,
Natalia Jasso
We thank Natalia Jasso for the comment.
We also apologize for the delay in our response. In fact Version 5.2 has only just become available on the Apple Mac App store although it is labeled Version 5.1.2. A click on “Update” should now do something.
This however, will not affect the problem with the Point Component described in the comment. In this regard Version 5.2 is the same as Version 5.1.1.
The units mm2 and mm are the only units available when the metric system is in use so they are not merely the default units.
“mm2” is intended to mean square millimetres or mm².
Note that at present only the cross-sectional area is used in the computations and also the graphics. In the graphics each point is represented by a circle that has the cross-sectional area. The bar diameter is ignored.
There appears to be something very wrong with this use of the application. We suspect that the problem with the “Compute ultimate bending moments” is a consequence of the same issue that caused the problem with the point components.
We would like to help Natalia Jasso. We would be pleased to receive the XSF file and other information such as an image of the cross-section that could also help.
The application main menu “xsec/ About xsec” leads to a dialog that displays a street address for Phillip Thompson. Natalia could send the information to that address. We can read most of the usual computer readable media; CD, flash drive, SD card. Alternatively as the XSF files are text files they could be printed on paper and sent voiding the need for computer readable media. In this case we would scan the paper and use OCR to recreate the file