SIDA Crack Control

Concrete elements experience cracking and stiffness degradation when subjected to design-level earthquakes. Therefore, crack control is one of the key considerations in the design of shear walls.
In conventional design practice, crack control is typically performed by visualizing tensile stresses across the wall section. Designers often determine wall cracking based on the maximum and minimum stress contours displayed in the program’s graphical interface. However, this manual approach may lead to human errors during the design process.
Furthermore, since the stiffness modification factors may change in each design stage, the stress distribution in the walls also varies. In a proper design procedure, crack control should be repeated through iterative analyses until the final design is achieved, considering the changes in stress at every analysis step.
 

 
To address this issue, SIDA Structure has developed a plugin for automatic crack control in shear walls.
This ETABS plugin not only simplifies the process of identifying cracking and assigning stiffness modification factors but also eliminates human errors that may occur during manual operations.
Moreover, the iterative process of assigning stiffness modifiers, reanalyzing the structure, and rechecking crack control is usually time-consuming and complex for designers. The ability to automatically perform iterative analyses is one of the major advantages of using this plugin, allowing engineers to reach an optimized and reliable design.

  The workflow is as follows:
The minimum cracking stress is first defined in the plugin based on ACI code provisions. Then, after specifying the number of analysis iterations and selecting the load combinations used for wall design, the plugin automatically runs the analysis in ETABS and assigns the corresponding cracking modification factors to the model.