Tekla Structures has dedicated reinforcement concrete design features. The licence cost is probably closer to 10k per seat.
You need computational geometry, computer graphics, and structural engineering expert level domain knowledge to implement anything. You need to create traditional 2D machine/construction design drawings from the 3D models. Then you need to sell it to corporations, whose work, most of all, must be dependable and free of guess work.
You need to know what sort of geometries you can use to model the reinforcements. Then you need to know how to design the system so it can handle very large amounts of geometry.
The worst of all is you need to deal with god awful industry standard formats- DWG, DGN, IFC, Step/Iges and so on. Maybe DWG import and export first.
To have any real chance you need a guy or two who are good with numerical code, someone who is familiar with e.g. Game engines, soemone who knows computer graphics, a structural engineer to tell how he does his job and what the thousand inconsistencies in the field are (this is not a trivial domain like housing or transport), a sales/marketing guy to connect and push the product.
And, like someone else estimated, the potential market is not gigantic - which is kinda funny because we all depend on reinforced concrete but don't need so many engineers for the design work...
> I was more leaning towards member design software, such as spColumn and S-Concrete.
The utility of your software tools will be very limited if you are restricting yourself to only member design instead of total structure solutions like ETABS. Why should engineer pay you at all if they can use spreadsheet for free to do what you do with your SaaS?
> No one I know is using the automated concrete design built into analysis programs like ETABS, Tekla, etc.
Not too sure about this because I know quite a lot of people who are using these tools. Any reason why the people you know don't use ETABS or Tekla?
> Why should engineer pay you at all if they can use spreadsheet for free to do what you do with your SaaS?
Why do businesses invest in new tech? Why pay for excel when I can use a pen and calculator? The answer is because it makes them more efficient. We have excel sheets to do the same thing, matlab code to do the same thing, and yet here we are paying for these member design tools because they are the most efficient for us. If you save an engineer even a couple of minutes for each element they are designing, you essentially pay for the software.
>Any reason why the people you know don't use ETABS or Tekla?
We do use ETABS extensively for analysis. We don't use it for design. It is foolhardy to trust the automated RC design in these software. That seemed to be the standard of practice around here, but perhaps it is different in other areas of the world.
> It is foolhardy to trust the automated RC design in these software
Do you mind if I ask why? I'm working on a sort of general approach toward designing trustworthy engineering software, and I'm trying to collect as many reasons as possible for "can't trust the software".
Since you can already do the analysis (like ETABS), and you are planning to do individual member design, why put the two and two together and do an automated RC analysis+design software? There is no reason to distrust an automated software anymore than separate analysis+design software.
There absolutely is a reason: seismic design. We end up doing a lot of data manipulation between the FEA stage and member design stage.
Its not a distrust so much as a fundamental flaw. For simple gravity design it works fine, but even then we are using spColumn because its just quicker for us.
Care to explain why you have to manually do lots of data manipulation between FEA and member design? Why not write a software that can automate these whatever data manipulation? Seems to me that an All-In-One software should have no problem doing analysis, the-whatever-data-manipulation, and the member design.
