Nice match: Carbon neutral design with Revit and GBS!

Greenbuildingstudio.com, the green-design web-extension for your cad software online service has just announced their third overhaul (i.e. v. 3.0). With more and more architecture and engineering offices embracing parametric building design (catchword: BIM = “Building Information Modeling”), this is a great tool to run a quick industry-standard (DOE-2) energy check on a virtual building and […] Read more..

Where are my AutoCAD settings???

(Or: Customizing AutoCAD in a computer lab with restrictive user permissions) I am teaching several CAD classes and our computer labs are all set up with very restrictive (currently Windows XP) user rights. And that makes sense. After all, I don’t want to find out at the beginning of class that half of the computers […] Read more..

Ah, there it is: SketchUp 6

It is here! After a bit of a wait, Google (formerly @Last software) released SketchUp 6 – again in a free-for-all and a professional version. Here is the official announcement. Upgrades (at least for US customers) are free and there’s a nifty wizard to accomplish a smooth upgrade. Sketchy view in SketchUp 6 using one […] Read more..

Inserting Holidays/Events Into Outlook

I got frustrated when my Outlook 2002 ran out of holidays December 2005. Searching around the internet I found some pages explaining how it is done. Holidays (or any kinds of "all-day" type events can be collected in a formatted text file and then simply imported into Outlook with one click. If you want to […] Read more..

DOWEL – A Software to Simulate Dowel-Type Connectors in Wood or Other Materials

The DOWEL program is a finite-element modeler for dowel-type connections (e.g. nails, bolts, lag screws) in wood-wood, wood-steel or any other type of connection material configuration. The underlying model has even been used for pile modeling in soil. It calculates load-displacement curves for monotonic and cyclic loading applictions and plots deformed shapes at predefined displacement steps. Material inputs consist of basic material embedment data. All material data is stored in a database that can be appended by the user.

Single-plate shear bolt test

Monotonic and Cyclic Behaviour of Slender Dowel-Type Fasteners in Wood-Steel-Wood Connections

The objective of this study was to investigate the monotonic and cyclic behaviour of different kinds of slender dowel-type fasteners. To accomplish this, four types of fasteners were tested in a series of 73 monotonic and cyclic tests. All tests used either one or two slotted-in steel plates in PARALLAM®, a Parallel Strand Lumber (PSL) product.