STAAD Foundation Advanced (SFA) is a powerful software for designing various types foundations, be it in building,  industrial or plant structure.  However, there has been a long-standing requirement for demonstration of the workflow on importing the support reaction and other information directly from spreadsheet to SFA. This is required when the engineer working on SFA doesn’t have STAAD on his computer and his client or colleague wants to  provide him with the support reaction values determined post STAAD analysis. The best way is exchanging the support reaction extracted from STAAD through spreadsheet. This video walks you through the step-by-step procedures to set the proper format of the spreadsheet and then import it to SFA. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZudEQQ0Xf0

This content is intended to give a quick tour on how to generate the MASS modeling for seismic analysis.
For a model that needs to have the static seismic as well as the response spectrum defined (mainly for the base shear comparison and scaling up the response quantities by “base shear due from static seismic” / “base shear due from response spectrum”), one must manually define the seismic weight and the mass modeling for both static seismic and response spectrum respectively. Unfortunately, this procedure can be very time-consuming if the model is large as the inertial information is to be defined twice in two separate situations.

IBC 2021 code in chapter 15 provides guidelines for roof-top structures with photo-voltaic systems to be designed for components and cladding in accordance with chapter 16. However, ASCE 7-16 standard has seen some radical changes for roof-mounted PV structures on the recommendations of The Structural Engineers Association of California (SEAOC) in Report SEAOC PV2-2012 for roof-top solar panels. However, this article will not explore the detailed calculation of wind loads.