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August 9, 2011 - Design Office 9, Service Release 1a
This update to service release 9.1 was included in the Design Office 9 service release 1a, but Sizer Stand-alone Service Release 1 contains Sizer 9.11.
Starting with version 9 of the program, in the Results by Group section of the Concept Mode design results, Sizer sometimes reports a member for a particular group that is significantly weaker then the members designed for the individual members from that Group in the “Results by Member”. When transferred to beam mode, the program designs for the same section size as in “Results by Member.” When the section size from “Results by Group” is designed in beam mode, the member fails, sometimes by a wide margin. The member reported in Results by Group is therefore not related to the actual passing design for the individual members in the group, and in some cases even has a section size different from the one selected by the user in the Design Groups input.
This occurs only when the width of the member that passes design is larger than the smallest width in the database, for example a 6 x member when there are 4 x members in the database. It therefore does not occur for dimension lumber members in the standard database files, which only have 2” widths in the database. It does occur for timber and glulam members.
The following problem was in fact corrected for version 9.0, but was only discovered since that time:
Starting with version 8.1 of the program, in Concept mode the program sometimes converted live loads to construction loads before designing the member. This was not evident until you exported the member to beam mode .As a result the design values for Concept mode contain a 1.25 load duration factor, instead of 1.0, making the program design for weaker members than intended. This problem occurs intermittently and it is necessary to check Concept mode designs made with versions 8.1-8.3 to verify if the problem occurred for any of your projects.