What’s new in Advance Design 2025

The new surface element stiffness modifiers in Advance Design 2025 give users ultimate control over every stiffness aspect in shells, plates, and membranes. Advance Design can now model special surface elements requiring different stiffnesses for bending, axial, and shear behaviors in each direction.

Having a full control on every stiffness aspect of the surface element gives the designer a wide range of practical applications, including modelling of voided slabs or walls that transfer only vertical forces.

Advance Design now offers improved load distribution for surfaces like roofing and walls. Previously, loads were transferred to supporting elements using failure lines theory, which worked well for simple, uniformly loaded areas. However, for complex loads and geometries, this method was less accurate. The latest Advance Design 2025 adds an optional finite element load distribution algorithm, ensuring precise load distribution for all scenarios.

With Advance Design 2025 you can easily model nine different types of geometries for PV panel support, adaptable to various project needs with customizable subtypes. The new geometry generator is suitable for designing large-scale solar farms, residential rooftops, and carport structures, promoting widespread solar energy adoption. User-friendly interface simplifies the modeling process, allowing engineers to quickly customize geometries, saving time and resources.

Starting with Advance Design 2025, Data grid tables can now create linear and point elements, including supports and loads. Users can add new elements by entering data in the table or importing from an Excel spreadsheet. This feature simplifies adding and managing objects using coordinates and other manual data inputs, as well as enabling the use of an Excel sheet as an environment for defining geometry.

In Advance Design 2025, foundation parameterization and visualization have been enhanced. This improves collaboration with the RC Footing module, simplifies foundation dimension verification, and enhances visualization and documentation. Information on eccentricity and pedestal dimensions is also included, allowing bidirectional data exchange with RC Footing for optimized foundation geometry display in the 3D model.

Advance Design 2025 expands cold-formed section capabilities, allowing parametric definition and verification of new section shapes per EN 1993-1-3, ACSI, and CSA standards. The newly introduced built-up sections, commonly used for columns and rafters, meet high customer demand.

In Advance Design 2025, you can now add reinforcing side or flange plates to welded truss connections. These plates strengthen rectangular hollow chords against face failure, brace failure, side wall buckling, and shear. For I/H chords, they prevent web yielding, brace failure, and shear.

Advance Design 2025 now supports the design of single tapered beams per §6.4.2 of EN 1995-1-1. These beams, commonly used in roof construction from glued laminated timber, have a rectangular section with a linear slope, typically under 10°, and can be modeled with different heights at each end, specifying the tapered side in the timber design settings.

Advance Design 2025 offers a significant speed increase of the timber engine due to multiple optimizations of the operations occurring during the Eurocode 5 design. On several models, the timber design engine performed up to 70% faster than in previous versions.

The latest version improves the algorithm for determining reinforcement in surface elements. This significantly reduces calculation time, especially for large models with many combinations, and especially during verifications according to Eurocode.

The latest version of the RC Slab module improves automatic strip generation on slabs by adding new parameters and mechanisms that consider span length and width, per the American ACI standard. You can now choose to generate strips along structural axes or automatically detected lines from supporting elements, with the option to temporarily disable selected axes for better control.

Advance Design 2025 now supports defining reinforced and confined masonry per EN 1996-1a and CR6-2013. Walls can be reinforced vertically and horizontally with the use of various types of vertical reinforcement arrangements. Confined masonry walls are reinforced to limit deformations vertically and horizontally, ensuring they carry loads, including seismic, with reinforced concrete providing confinement.

In Advance Design 2025, users can define their own keyboard shortcuts for any command. The customization dialog lets users view current shortcuts and add new ones for any command.

In Advance Design 2025, result tables can now display the loads or combinations that generate extreme results (displacement, internal forces, and stresses). Instead of long tables, users can display only results with extreme values for each element. This greatly simplifies and speeds up the analysis of tabular results.

Advance Design 2025 introduces a new report creation mechanism that generates content directly in Microsoft Word (DOCX) format, eliminating the limitations of the old RTF-based system. This new mechanism, based on Microsoft’s OpenXML, offers better speed, quality, and future enhancements like improved previewing.