A simple design tool for the calculation of effective section area for class 4 closed section using ms-excel

• Main Author: Deng, Liang
• Other Authors: Lee Chi King
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2014
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/60098
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Rectangular Hollow Section (RHS) is one of the most widely used sections in construction. According to Eurocode 3 structural design standard, class 4 RHS requires effective area revise due to local buckling. To increase the structural design precision and the safety of the structure, the Effective Width method was developed to approach the actual effective area by iteration, but it is very time-consuming and impractical with manual calculation due to complex calculation procedure and tedious calculations. Though simplified method reduces the calculation time, it sacrifices the precision, and is still quite time-consuming. Consequently, a user-friendly and open-source program is in demand in order to accelerate the calculation significantly and retain the high precision at the same time. In this project, a Visual Basic Application language based program was developed to automate the iterative calculations, and this program provides not only the optimized effective area, but also many useful intermediate parameters. Besides, this program is very user-friendly and highly customizable. Quantitatively, this program could provide extremely accurate results with precision more than 15 decimal places, and the efficiency is increased at least 700 times as compared to manual calculation.