Structural steel overview

- [Instructor] Welcome to Chapter Three! In this lesson, we're going to take a look at the structural steel elements that are provided with the Plant 3D Product. So, let's go ahead and open our project. So, we're going to go to Project Manager. We're going to go to our Open, Desktop, Exercise Files, Chapter 03, and we want our Project.xml. So, you'll see here under our Plant 3D Drawings. Let's just open 03_01_Struct.

And let's take a look at what we have across the top of our Ribbon Menu here. We have our Home tab, and the third tab along is our structural tab. Everything that we do with the structural design tools are contained in this area on the Ribbon Menu. So, to change the type of components that we're using here, we go to My Settings. And under Member Settings, for example, it's going to open a dialogue box, and in here, you can see we have a number of different types of standard steel shapes, depending on the country or the region that you're working in.

For this lesson, we're going to stick with the AISC standard shapes, and you can see here, we have a number of different standard member types and all the different shapes and options available. We can also look at insert points, it depending on how we insert our structural member. We can change the angle. We can the insert point if we want to insert from the midpoint corner. So, a number of different controls here with our orientation. We can look at the access and the angle. We can flip these steel shapes around.

We'll get into that little later. But this is sort of our navigation on how we can control the placement of our steel. And under material, we have a number of different materials we can use here. And once we've chosen this particular member, and we say, okay that's the one that we'll be placing in our drawing. And the same goes for going through railings. I'll just quickly run through here, and you can see when you're working with railings, you can set these various parameters here, based on the standards that you're going to be using. We can choose a different handrail shape. We can choose from the different heights, elevations.

And again, I'm just going to work through. The stairs is the same. We could do a set of risers, our distances. And one that we use a little more often is Ladder Settings, where we have two sets of options. We can set the parameters for our ladder and also for the cage. So all that gets done in the Parts Insertion. Once we have some structural elements placed here, we can use this Structure Edit. We can just click on the button, and then that will allow us to edit the member. Or we can explode just into regular AutoCAD line shapes.

We have some tools available for cutting. Now, we can't do complex shapes, such as coping or any kind of detailed connections, when working with structural steel. But we can make it look relatively clean. And bear in mind, that the shapes that we use here aren't actually used for detailing. They are what we would consider to be sort of a white steel or a placeholder, that would then be sent into a fully, full-featured structural detailing program, such as Advance Steel, and it would get finished off in there. And our visibility just allows us to control a little bit more of what we see inside the plant as we're designing it.

Just allow us to navigate through the 3D a little better, and make better viewpoints for us, so we can remove obstructions, that type of thing. So, the structural steel module is more than adequate for creating what we would typically refer to as white steel or piper steel, where the piper creates what's essentially a smart placeholder and that's then turned over to the structural team to design in detail. We should be able to show a basic placement of any support structure, and the Intelligence permits you to create a bill of materials that will quantify the materials needed to build the structure.