New Release - STAAD.Pro 2025 Featured

This version adds great new functionality to improve efficiency for engineers around the world and has resolved numerous issues that have been reported. It is highly recommended that you adopt this version and improve your working experience. 

Improved Serviceability Design

There are two basic attributes that are typically considered in the behaviour of a steel structure. The first is strength design, which is ensuring that the provided members have sufficient capacity to take the forces they will be subjected to. The second consideration is ensuring that the structure does not flex in a way that will cause applied finishes to crack and fail. This is achieved with serviceability checks - sometimes referred to as deflection checks - that STAAD.Pro can provide. For a serviceability check to be performed, the positions that represent the end points of the member must be defined. In many cases these are not the same as the analytical beam ends. Rather, these could be a different node point. To provide STAAD.Pro this information, the start and end nodes to be considered for the serviceability check on a member must be assigned using design parameters DJ1 and DJ2. On larger models the steps to do this on each member could be time consuming, so a tool has been developed to provide a rapid creation of these parameters.

The serviceability design itself has been improved to provide additional insights into the deflection checks. The report now includes details of the deflection ratio in the local major and minor axes as well as overall deflection. Additionally, serviceability checks can include an option to ignore the axial elongation in the check.

Advanced Combination Rules

For several years now, STAAD.Pro has included a great tool to quickly create the necessary load combinations as given by various specification bodies. This tool allowed you to assign a load category to each of the primary load cases or allowed you to create your own rules. However, the rules defined in the Eurocode are more complex than could be supported using basic rules. A macro using OpenSTAAD was offered to provide a method for these combinations to be generated. This macro did have some limitations, so a more comprehensive tool has been added to the standard Load Combination Generator. With STAAD.Pro 2025, you can now have STAAD.Pro follow the rules published in EN-1990-2002. Using the categories assigned to the primary load cases, the Eurocode identifies loading as applied actions such as permanent, variable, etc. as opposed to the load categories as used in STAAD.Pro (dead, live, wind, etc.). So the configuration of the Eurocode combination generator includes a mapping for load types to the action per Eurocode. Additionally, there are different factors to consider when a permanent action can act favourably or unfavourably.
 
Eleven different combination rules from the Eurocode have been included. As with the basic combination method, you are provided the option to create your own variations of the Eurocode using the building blocks of Permanent, Pre-Stress, Accidental, Seismic and Variable action as defined in the code if so desired.

With the complexity of the equations and the numbers of primary load cases, even a modest sized model with just a few primary load cases can result in hundreds -even thousands- of combination cases. This, in turn, results in a very large result set that can take a significant time to process so it is recommended to review the list of combinations generated prior to adding them to the model.

Material Database

When creating a new STAAD.Pro model, designers have had access to a few standard materials such as generic steel and concrete. Although additional materials could be defined and included in the model, it was recognised that a significant improvement would be to have standard materials offered in a database, just like the way standard profiles are offered. So the Database Manager has been extended to support material definitions as well as standard profiles.

A few collections have been included but this can be extended to suit whatever materials you regularly use to aid in more rapid and consistent model generation.

IS 800 Improvements

The Indian steel design to the IS800 LSD methods have been further improved by proving alternative methods for checking slender profiles which are not clearly defined in the IS800 publication, so instead can follow the method defined in the NBC 2016 code.
 
A method has been provided to all for the web of slender I shaped profiles to be included in the design when calculating bending capacity, which is an accepted practice for structures located in a low seismic region.
 
A capability offered to designs of AISC 360-2016 and 2022 has been extended to IS800:2007 designs. In the Post Processing workflow, the Utilization layout provides support to display the results from any of the defined parameter blocks, not just the last one.

In this way, you can visually track member design utilization under various conditions including which of them resulted in the highest overall.

Foundation Design Workflow

A significant update has taken place in STAAD.Pro to reflect the major changes offered with the latest edition of STAAD Foundation Advanced. This solution offered as a standalone application or as part of the Structural Worksuite, to design mats, isolated, combined pads and pile caps, using the information about the superstructure model and support reactions obtained from the STAAD.Pro analysis.

STAAD Foundation Advanced 2025 is now accessed directly from within STAAD.Pro, replacing the earlier SFA V9. The major enhancement is the data management available with this integration. Not only is the STAAD.Pro model used as the initial primary superstructure data for the STAAD Foundation Advanced project, but there is now a monitor in STAAD Foundation. Multiple STAAD.Pro models can be imported into a single STAAD Foundation Advanced project to collate a site of separate structures into a single foundation project.
Simple import configurations allow better control of the import process including locating the STAAD model, selecting the results sets needed for design and locating the model into the project.

Note that a standard STAAD.Pro license can be used to access a limited feature set in STAAD Foundation Advanced. To access all the capabilities offered in the application, either a STAAD Foundation Advanced or Structural Worksuite license is required.

ADINA Export Link Element

A major use of the ADINA application is solving non-linear analytical problems which include material non-linearity behaviour. For example, blast loading that causes plastic deformation of key parts of the structure. ADINA has become a tool that many engineers now use to understand the outcome of such loading. For a structure already modelled in STAAD.Pro, using the ADINA export feature means the long process of creating the data can be avoided. 

With STAAD.Pro 2025, new member attributes can be assigned to various structural beams to provide additional data when exported to ADINA. While these attributes have no impact in the STAAD analysis, they are used to identify various types of link elements to be considered in the ADINA non-linear analysis.

Wind Loading – US, ASCE 7, 2022

Wind loads are evaluated based on the profile of wind pressure over a building’s height. Methods to determine this profile have been published in several codes and other documents and many of these have been provided as a collection of wizards in the loading dialog. With STAAD.Pro 2025, this collection has been increased by the addition of a wizard to define the load profile for building structures to the 2022 ASCE – 7 specification. While the input requirements of the wizard are the same as for the 2016 edition, the wizard itself has been updated to align with the newer requirements of this code.

Extended Direct Analysis Control

When considering structural stability, the AISC 360 publications suggest a possible analysis method based around the secondary p-delta effects and reduced bending and axial stiffnesses which occur on highly loaded members. This analysis method is also offered in the Canadian CISC CSA S16-19 publication. The CSA S16-19 includes an additional reduction factor on the axial stiffness of tau-b which can now be accounted for in the Direct Analysis. The option to select the code for a direct analysis is now available.

As part of this update, a more detailed output from the analysis is also included in the analysis results.

 Chinese Steel Design - Fire Protection Design (Technical Preview)

Designers who use the Chinese Steel Design workflow now have an additional option to check the steelwork not only for strength, but also for compliance to the requirements of GB51249-2017, Code for Fire Safety of Steel Structures in Buildings, which defines how to account for the changes in structural behaviour in different fire events which will degrade the properties of steel.
The requirements are created as an additional set of design parameters, much like the method used to define parameters for the hot or cold steel member design to GB50017 or GB50018. 

The temperature profiles for the hot smoke and member profiles can be customised along with a material against temperature effectiveness curve. Default values can be used which follow recommendations from the code.

The design provides various methods for accounting for changes in the structural behaviour such as bearing capacity or critical temperature.

STAAD.Pro Cloud Analysis (Technical Preview)

We have been running an early access program to allow invited designers of more complex models (i.e., those that typically require analysis times of more than 30 minutes) to explore the benefits of using a solution using a cloud-based analysis method. This solution takes advantage of some of the most powerful computers available and accelerating to a solution by solving multiple load cases simultaneously. We have had some great feedback which has resulted in several significant improvements including optimizations in creating and uploading sub-models and in the aggregations and reporting of steel designs.

* Included with ‘Structural SELECT Entitlements’

** Additional license required, included with ‘STAAD.Pro Advanced’ and ‘Structural WorkSuite’

*** Additional license required, included with ‘Structural WorkSuite’

**** Additional license for ‘STAAD Nuclear QA & Reporting’ required

Revision History

The Revision History document details the issues that have been addressed and as with all builds is included in the ReadMe file which can be accessed from the Help section of the application and can also be found here RAM | STAAD | ADINA - STAAD.Pro 2025.00.00 Revision History - Communities .