Isolated Foundations - when the base level of an isolated foundation is moved, the current foundation along with support moves to the new level where in previous releases it would be deleted. Sub Structures - further to recent enhancements to the creation and management of Sub Structures, additional enhancements have been made in this release so that members created/edited/copied/moved while working in a Sub Structure view are retained in the Sub Structure. Flanged concrete beams - this impacts the time taken for analysis and design and can result in an improvement in performance (in terms of reduced overall analysis and design time) of 2-3 times or more.

Composite beams - this primarily impacts the time taken to populate the Properties Window for a selection of beams - a selection of many beams in larger models which previously could occupy a few minutes now takes a matter of seconds. This improves the performance particularly for very large models with 1000’s of beam spans: Composite Beams and Concrete Beams - significant improvements are made to the calculation process for both the effective width of composite beams (both floor and natural frequency) and flange widths of concrete beams. An example of this is given directly below: A number of additional fixes which are not detailed explicitly here are also made to improve general performance and stability. New Lateral Force Resisting System Wall Type - Shear Only Walls New Line and Area Ancillaries - application of loading from ladders, stairs, pipework etc Note that for existing models with this circumstance, the Wind Wizard must be run again to correct the peak velocity pressure qp value. Loads for other Terrain categories were not affected. Wind Wizard - Finland (Eurocode) Head Code - for Terrain category 0 (Sea), the calculated peak velocity pressure qp was incorrect and too low, thus producing wind loads which were not conservative. This issue has been resolved in this release and use of shear only walls reinstated. Due to the potential for mis-use and mis-understanding this caused, the option to use shear only walls was accordingly removed in the 2020 SP2 release (version 20.0.2.). However, the initial modeling formulation for these had the limitation of failing to report the vertical ‘push-pull’ effects at the ends of the panel that would be expected to be present to resist overturning. Shear only walls - these were introduced in the 2020 first release (version 20.0.0.129 March 2020).

Tekla Structures 2023 SP4 downloading