Span tables, calculators, design software

Span Tables and Calculators 

• American Wood Council – Offers span tables as well as online span, connections, areas and heights calculators, and WoodWorks Design Office software. 
• APA – The Engineered Wood Association – Includes span tables for APA structural use panels. 
• Southern Pine Council – Includes a range of span tables for southern pine joists and rafters. 
• Western Wood Products Association – Online Lumber Technical Guide includes Western lumber span tables for common loading conditions for floor and ceiling joists and rafters, with size and repetitive member adjustments built in. WWPA also offers the popular Lumber Design Suite and Lumber DesignEasy programs, which can enhance the lumber specification process. The programs, which work in concert with Microsoft Excel, assist in calculating horizontal framing (beams and joists), vertical framing (posts and studs) and wood-to-wood shear connections.

Wood Design Software

Building designers have a growing range of software options for the design of all wood buildings as well as hybrid structures of wood and other materials.

• RISA Technologies has expanded its popular structural design software package to include complete wood design capabilities. RISA offers three software programs—RISA-2D, RISA-3D and RISAFloor—all of which incorporate new wood features. RISAFloor and RISA-3D together comprise the “building system” software used to design a complete structure. RISAFloor is used first for gravity analysis & design, and RISA-3D is then used for lateral analysis. (This is where shear walls and diaphragms are analyzed and designed.) RISA-2D is generally used for single component design, including multiple shear walls in a single wall design. For information visit http://www.risa.com/ or click here to view a flyer on the wood features.
  
  
• WoodWorks engineering software for wood design (no relation to the WoodWorks non-residential program) is produced by the Canadian Wood Council and, in the U.S., is based on the National Design Specification® (NDS®) for Wood Construction. It includes three modules—Sizer, Shearwalls and Connections—and is being updated with an interactive link to Revit, Autodesk’s Building Information Modeling (BIM) software, to make it easy to determine within the Revit model whether selected wood members will be structurally adequate to resist user applied loads. Click here for more information.