RISA Technologies Acquires ERITower

The structural engineering community suffered a sad loss with the passing of Dan Horn on July 19, 2004. Dan was the author of ERITower, the industry standard for tower design software. RISA Technologies has reached an agreement with Judith Horn, Dan’s widow, which allows us to become the caretakers of ERITower.

The acquisition of this specialized tower program complements RISA’s top-rated FEA applications RISA-3D and RISAFloor. ERITower gives RISA Technologies’ clients another powerful tool for the analysis, design and optimization of all types of structures.

ERITower was a joint effort between C-Concepts, Inc., founded by Horn in 1997, and Electronics Research, Inc. ERI contracted Horn in February 1998 to write a tower program that would be easy for designers to generate both self-supporting towers and guyed towers. Horn bought the rights to ERITower in 2000 and started selling the software through his company, C-Concepts, Inc.

RISA Technologies will finish the implementation of the TIA/EIA-222 Revision G standard Horn started before he passed away unexpectedly July 19, 2004.

“The structural engineering community suffered a tragic loss with the passing of Dan,” says Bruce R. Bates, President, RISA Technologies. “We are very excited to continue the standard of excellence Dan Horn maintained with ERITower.

“I was acquainted with Dan back in his ECOM (Associates) days and though I never had the privilege of knowing him well I was always impressed with the quality of his work. He is certainly one of the pioneers of structural engineering software.”

Horn had a distinguished career as a structural engineer and software developer. He received a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from Purdue University and a master’s degree in structural engineering from the University of Wisconsin. He started his career designing bridges for the city of Milwaukee but found his niche developing software programs for structural engineers.

He worked for Computer Structural Design and later did considerable computer programming for ECOM Associates, a division of CSD. During his time with CSD, Horn developed STRAAD 3D and wrote more than a million lines of code in the C programming language.

“He was an awfully talented person and a hell of a programmer,” says John W. Robinson, a friend and co-worker and principal engineer at ERI. “His loss is hard for everyone who knew him.”

Latest from RISA

Introducing RISAMasonry

The recent releases of RISA-3D 5.5 and RISAFloor 2.0 represent major updates to RISA’s most popular programs. From automatic plate mesh generation in RISA-3D to concrete beam design with tapered area loads in RISAFloor, the releases have many new features that make this top-rated software the premier choice for analysis and design of all types of structures.

Key new features of RISA-3D 5.5 include an automatic plate mesh generator tool that enables you to draw a polygon to generate a mesh of well-formed plates and the ability to design concrete beams in T and L sections.

The improvements to RISAFloor 2.0, notably the full model plotting “floor below” display and faster floor solutions, boost performance and improve productivity.

Both RISA-3D 5.5 and RISAFloor 2.0 are now fully integrated with RISAFoot. Cold formed steel manufacturer databases and updated Canadian, Indian and British design codes for all materials are among the numerous enhancements included in the RISA-3D 5.5 and RISAFloor 2.0 upgrades.

Awards of Excellence

RISA-3D was used on four of the 11 projects among this year’s winners of the AISC Engineering Awards of Excellence. Awarded by AISC, the Engineering Awards of Excellence recognize engineering excellence and innovation in steel-framed buildings. They were announced in May’s issue of Modern Steel Magazine. The following is a complete list of award winners that used RISA-3D:

$25M or Greater, But Less Than $100M
National Winner: William J. Clinton Presidential Center Museum Building, Little Rock, Ark.

$10M or Greater, But Less Than $25M
Merit Award: St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Houston

Less Than $10M
Merit Award: Davis Conference Center, Layton, Utah

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Top Firms Choose RISA
For Brad Read, the opportunity to perform a structural analysis of the renowned Crystal Cathedral was an once-in-a-lifetime experience. Read, the Director of Engineering for Burbank, Calif.-based Entertainment Engineering, Inc., is the first to create a computer model of the world-famous landmark.

Read modeled the 25-year-old structure with RISA-3D, producing a model with more than 26,000 members. Completed in 1980, the Crystal Cathedral is star-shaped chamber featuring a glass-paneled exterior held
in place by an intricate
steel lattice.

“It was an honor,” Read says. “I've always looked at this building as a masterpiece.”

Download a case study (PDF, 361 KB) on the Crystal Cathedral project.

Entertainment Engineering was contracted to do a FEA on the building for a new show debuting this year. For years, the Crystal Cathedral Ministries used a preliminary analysis made by the building’s architect, the late Philip Johnson, to determine the load capacity of the building.

When Read set out to create his model, the calculations and real-world testing of the original analysis was lost. He had to start from scratch, using Johnson’s hand-drawn plans as a guide. Along the way, he discovered some of the building’s unique features, including both ductile and solid piping and more than 500 individual knee members.

RISA-3D‘s powerful drawing capabilities and effortless interface not only made the process possible but surprisingly simple.

“The ability to be able to turn on and off members by isolating planes made it real easy to work with the member sections,” Read says. “It’s something I found impossible to do in other beam editors and structural analysis software."

In this issue, we hear from Peter Chojnacki, a Senior Software Engineer at RISA Technologies. Chojnacki discusses a few projects he’s working on and describes some of his daily duties and his area of expertise.

Q. What is your area of expertise?
A. “I have over 16 years of experience in the construction industry and software development. My civil engineering experience includes hands-on analysis and design of buildings, bridges, retaining walls, almost the entire spectrum of structural types, as well as project management. On the software side I specialize in structural design codes implementation and user interface design.”

Q. Describe your duties at RISA?
A. “It’s part software development and part structural engineering. My main focus is on the implementation of structural design specifications in RISA software.

“One of the more challenging and interesting aspects of my work is a need to design programs that will handle any of the numerous scenarios likely to occur in a structural engineering design practice. That’s much different from any single structural design project where the parameters usually stay within established ranges. For a program to be versatile and dependable, its design must account for a variety of sometimes extreme circumstances.”

Q. What projects are you currently working on?
A. “We have just completed an overhaul of the data input and output routines which produced a cleaner and much more robust project file format. This will enable our partners to link their software to RISA-3D more easily and more completely. It will also allow users to better understand the contents of their input files.

“Recently RISA Technologies acquired a leading software package for design of communications towers ERI Tower. There are great opportunities in this market segment, and we are finalizing the implementation of the upcoming G version of the TIA/EIA-222 design standard. In addition, I would like to overhaul the program’s user interface to enhance and speed up its data input.

“I am also working on bringing connection design to RISA-3D by linking the program with a state-of-the-art connection design module by Omnitech Associates.”

The newest member of the development team, Peter Chojnacki brings a wealth of experience as both a structural engineer and software developer to RISA. Prior to joining RISA Technologies, Peter spent four years at Research Engineers Inc. where he was responsible for, among other things, software implementation of design codes and setting requirements for design features of various STAAD modules.

A native of Warsaw, Poland, Peter has a M.Eng. in Structural Engineering from the Warsaw University of Technology (Politechnika Warszawska) and a Computer Science diploma from the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. Peter lives in Irvine, California, with his wife, Renata, and daughter, Sara.