What is the effect of specifying walls above?
Wall elements can be used to model the stiffness and spanning ability of walls connected to the slab. Walls above behave similarly to beams in that they stiffen the floor. One could actually model the walls above the slab as beams instead, but it is not generally recommended. Using beam or slab elements does have some advantages over using wall elements (“wall-beams”): • Concept design strip cross sections automatically integrate the forces across slab-beam elements; wall-beam elements are ignored in these integrations, however. • Also, Concept provides you many controls over how slab element results can be displayed; wall-beam elements (like wall elements) can only plot their reactions to the slab. • However, Concept’s standard slab elements have a torsional stiffness that is proportional to their depth cubed. This can cause a large over-estimation of the torsional stiffness for a very thick slab element if it is adjacent to relatively thin elements. “Wall-beam” elements do not have t
