New SCIA Engineer 16 announced—delivers 350+ updates structural engineering app

Belgium-based SCIA, a Nemetschek Group company, has this week announced SCIA Engineer 16, the latest version of its global leading structural design software that supports the BIM process in the building industry.

SCIA Engineer 16, with a focus on usability, has released its updated application with more than 350 updates and new features. Important new enhancements focus on concrete and steel design. The result is an improved structural design program that provides engineers with a faster and easier way to delivery quality results.

A Huge Update—Customer Driven

“This release comes with a long list of enhancements that streamline the entire engineering workflow,” said Hilde Sevens, CEO at SCIA. “Some of the new developments are aimed at solving specific problems for specialty projects; others will impact the day-to-day practice of every engineer. Most of these upgrades were made as a direct result of customer requests.”

01 – SCIA Engineer 16’s many improvements include new graphical representations of strains and stresses in members, and include new mark highlight feature for exact values in a 3D model highlighting table result values as shown here.

In fact, over 70 percent of version 16’s updates and features were born from customer feedback. Some of the tools and features in this release include:

Concrete 

• New workflows and improved design of concrete beams and columns (Eurocode 2)
• A new concrete shear wall and frame module that includes Pushover (ACI 318-14, ASCI/SEI 7-10 and FEMA 356)
• Improved concrete slab and shell design (NBR 6118:2014)

Steel 

• Composite floor members improvements (AISC 360-10, EN 1994)
• New cold-formed steel design (NBR 14762)
• New bi-axial steel connection design (EN 1993)

Analysis and Results

• New extensions to 3D Results and General Plasticity including: output of total and plastic strains, additional yield criterion Drucker-Prager and Mohr-Coulomb
• Triangular finite elements during meshing for membrane elements
• Automatic mesh refinement supports multiple load cases

BIM and Usability

• Export to Tekla v21.1
• IFC support for Allplan
• Import of PDF files into Engineering Report

“SCIA Engineer 16 comes on heels of 15.3,” said Dr. Johan Vanwelkenhuysen, CTO, SCIA. “The technological and organizational changes we’ve put in place are allowing us to react more quickly to the needs of our customers and the larger engineering community. SCIA Engineer 16 is a major step forward in terms of quality and usability, which are the development themes we’ve set for upcoming releases of SCIA Engineer.”

For more information on SCIA Engineer 16, or to download a FREE trial, please visit https://www.scia.net/SE16.

Architosh Analysis

SCIA Engineer is an impressive piece of software engineering. While there several globally important structural engineering software packages for structural engineering and design, SCIA Engineer has largely stood out for sometime for its true BIM orientation. This is not a tool that competes with Revit Structure, if readers are curious. SCIA integrates structural modeling, structural analysis, code design and reporting. Uniquely, SCIA Engineer 16 is the only engineering and analysis tool that is IFC 2×3 certified, says Dan Monaghan, Managing Director of SCIA in North America.

01 – New IFC capabilities in SCIA Engineer 16 focus on ALLPLAN integration improvements. SCIA Engineer 16 is IFX 2×3 certified, the only such software in its class to be so.

In this release, the IFC workflow improves on what before was an existing XML link between SCIA Engineer and ALLPLAN, a popular sequence of tools with engineers and architects in Europe. The issue solved in this version with XML is that the IFC is more stable, whereas before when ALLPLAN updated or SCIA updated it often meant the XML link, which was proprietary, needed to be updated or fixed to work again.

SCIA Engineer 16’s additional IFC features means that there are unique tools that enable users to convert IFC objects into native SCIA Engineer objects and to clean those objects up.