An educational program for teaching design and detailing of reinforced concrete beams

Resumo

Reinforced concrete (RC) beam design has been automated for decades, and a large number of different comercial and free softwares have been developed for this task. Nonetheless few simple free tools independent of large general-purpose softwares are available for educational purposes and/or validation of analysis and design of RC beams. This paper presents a simple desktop-based graphic interactive program able to carry out the analysis, design and complete detailing of RC continuous beams for buildings, with several options and configurations for the tailoring of the engineer design preferences. It provides an easy-to-use process which allows a student to develop the sense and the experience on design of RC beams. The graphical user interface (GUI) is inspired by the FTOOL program.