1) Integrated Design Environment
Are you sweating design changes you made at elevated floors due to the potential impact on the foundation? The time of revisiting the foundation system repeatedly throughout the design phase can quickly add up. With the integration of RAM Foundation with the RAM Structural System, all the most current loading, member, material, and geometric information is current. Changes to gravity and lateral loads and framing members are immediately reflected in the Foundation module. With RAM Structural System and RAM Foundation there is no need to labor over hand load traces, or manually merge foundation loads from multiple analysis environments. This is the power of the integrated design environment.
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2) Ease of Use
One of the primary goals of RAM Foundation is to allow the engineer to achieve foundation designs as quickly and easily as possible, without the burden of superfluous input. RAM Foundation features an intuitive user interface, drastically reducing the overhead associated with a learning curve. The engineer does not have to deal with concepts such as finite elements, meshing, or coordinate systems. Rather, RAM Foundation uses language that the structural engineer deals with on a daily basis therefore drawing a parallel between the engineer's software and the contract documents.
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3) Multiple Foundation Types
All three of the most commonly used foundation element types: spread footings, continuous footings, and pile supported caps, are supported by RAM Foundation. Different foundation scenarios can easily be investigated and evaluated with minimal revision time.
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4) Design Optimization
RAM Foundation automatically sizes footing dimensions and reinforcement using the design criteria the user has specified and all relevant parameters from the RAM Structural System model. The program is NOT limited to performing design checks, which would require the user to iteratively find an optimum footing design.
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5) Flexible and Advanced Design Criteria Options
RAM Foundation offers a broad range of user specified criteria. Engineers can customize the RAM Foundation environment to the specific needs of a project and use these settings as the default for future RAM Foundation sessions. In addition, RAM Foundation allows the user to specify numerous fine grain design options including
- Design of spread footings and pile caps for either true design forces or for soil capacity
- Specify thickness increment and plan dimension increments to be used during optimization
- Ability to group spread footings of equal dimensions based on controlling reinforcing design
- Option to keep spread footings square during optimization
- Ability to specify a minimum number of bars in footings
- Option to use the same number of bars in both directions for spread footings
- Consideration of construction tolerance for piles
- Ability to either explicitly define clear bar cover, bar spacing, and reinforcement ratio requirements for reinforcement or use the values required by the specified design code.
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6) Flexible Editing of Designs
RAM's well known View/Update command exists in RAM Foundation as well. Once an optimized design has been selected by the program the user may change the footing dimensions, reinforcing, or material properties to fine tune the design.
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7) Reports and Drawings
Ram Foundation offers a wide range of design reports summarizing the selected design criteria, user preferences, material quantities, design forces, and design results. Each report can be viewed on screen, stored in a text file, or sent to the printer. In addition, once RAM Foundation has performed the design for each of the footings in the model, a DXF footing design schedule can be created in Ram Manager to automatically generate drawings.
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