Dynamic Analysis Engineering Consulting

About Dynamic Analysis

Dynamic Analysis is a boutique civil and structural engineering firm based in Billings, Montana. The company focuses on offering specialized consulting for residential and low-rise commercial projects.

Sam, Dynamic Analysis' Principal Engineer, has experience across mining, transport, and manufacturing construction.

The challenge

Dynamic Analysis deals with an equal split of designing for new builds - additions, remodels, or entirely new buildings - and reviewing repair plans.

"Our workflow is generally drafting a model of what we're building, and then breaking them into sizing beams and foundations before using a program to determine environmental loading for wind and snow."

While the company had previously used a structural design software alongside their own Excel spreadsheets, one of the limitations they encountered was that structural members are not tied together.

"We'll go through each structural member and go back and forth between drafting and running calculations. When there's a clash in size, we would go back, reiterate through the building again."

A pricing change by their previous vendor made it time to look for alternatives:

"The product we used was so cheap before that it just made tolerating the bugs and issues fine, but, when they updated their pricing, all of a sudden it didn't make a lot of sense."

How Calcs.com helps

After starting to use Calcs.com, it has become the tool Dynamic Analysis uses for almost all of their projects.

"We are juggling 7 to 9 projects right now with many more coming in. Most of them, small stuff, anything from people just wanting to open up a bearing wall and put a beam in which Calcs.com has been pretty handy for, and then to just full new residential houses."

"The usability of the software has been nice. It is very clear to see what the software is doing when it comes to the calculations."

Linking loads dynamically

The most valuable feature Sam found in Calcs.com is being able to link the load path dynamically from one structural member to another.

Before using Calcs.com, Sam and his team would generate a printout with individual dead loads, live loads, snow loads, and wind loads for each member.

"So anytime there's a change, you got to go back, start over and redo the first calculation, get those loads, pull up the next calculation, read over from one screen what those load reactions were, and enter them individually. It was just a massive time suck to make one small change."

With Calcs.com's load linking feature, reactions between members are dynamically tracked, so the loads inherited into the lower member are always updated automatically.

Automatically generated loads

Having the option to use presets in Calcs.com's calculations was also a useful feature. Getting access to different presets like ridge beam, roof rafter, or ceiling joist with prefilled settings means they can save time on every project.

"Being able to be specific about what type of beam you're using is really nice. If we're sizing a Ridge Beam, it just automatically throws in what our snow loads are. All we need to do is assign the width of the building and then pick our beam - that's the only two inputs it requires. It's already got all the loads in there, and it figures out the tributary area and knows what forces are coming down on it. It just takes like 30 seconds."

"It's not something I ever really thought I needed, but it's a handy feature."

Helpful reports

Calcs.com's automatically generated and standardized reports have also been indispensable to Sam and his team for internal reviews and permit submissions.

"We find Calcs.com reports way more helpful than some of what we've seen in the market. For example, with the previous product, I'd print out a report, and I just had no idea if it worked or not. It basically just puked out a ton of information, and I find myself asking, is this okay or not?"

Having Calcs.com printouts break down calculations into all the different failure modes - and into what's governing or where it's failing - is very valuable to Sam.

"Especially for repair plans, then we can really demonstrate if we have an issue. We can just run through existing conditions and say, okay, this type of failure is bending failure. When we run this member through with these loads, we're seeing we're at 400% capacity. So everything checks out that this thing is failing in bending, we need to make something stronger."