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You have to research. Comparisons are useful, talk to your advisor or teacher. Performance based design, is a very good topic. I know a friend, who got a job in Foster Wheeler because his undergrad proj was on that.

Well i just found out a nice presentation about the question you are asking. I would recommend you to go here http://www.slideshare.net/neikrof/membrane-plate-shell

you are right to put the same thickness in membrane and in bending. the thickness you put in membrane will give self weight and the bending will give you the bending simple. If you are using precast panels you can put different thickness in membrane and bending. You can put only the top screed thickness in membrane and slab thickness in bending. Shell: transfers loads to nodes of that shell element. Like in flat slabs. Loads will go directly to columns. You cannot design beams on shell unless you have meshed it finely. In plane as well as out of plane stiffness Membrane: transfers loads to beams. It has only inplane forces Thick plate is used where shear deformations are important but the mesh is simple. Thick plate is generally used when span over thickness is less than 15 for example if slab is 600mm and span is 6m then ratio is 6/0.6 = 10. You can use thick plate option. It has only out of plane stiffness All this is given in manual helps of CSI softwares.

I was wondering about the people and activities of SEFP. Have a look at the following stats (date: 22.aug.2012). This is my agenda for next 3 months for SEFP. Please lets start to define some roles and targets for SEFP. You can disagree and put it down but vote for me how many of you agree with me! I wanna see the stats and numbers. Afterall this is just a suggestion. Total members: 816 This number is decent. At this point i care about participation & quality instead of just a crowd doing nothing out there. Total posts: 918 [ 66% of all the posts are by top 5 members ] Post count by top 2% members should not go above 70%. 1) Atleast 30% contribution to SEFP should be from 98% members to get a feeling the SEFP is not just run by the moderating team. Average post rate: 1.125 post per member Should reach upto 1.3 2) Ensures improved density of posts over the total population of SEFP The most liked content is by: 6 users Believe it or not. Its a measure of active members of the forum. Need to make it to 8 (not just 1 post...rather many posts by more than 8 people liking) 3) To develop the habit and to encourage people to appreciate others work and say Thanks to him/her. Users with more than 10 posts: only 16 Here i use my own self devised rule that the %age of members posting more than 1% of the total posts (9.18) should be more than 2%. In our case it is 1.96%. Lets make it 2% 4) To ensure that there is always performance. If the no of members increases so should the post count. Among the moderating team of: 11 members (if we exclude admin) the ratio is 1 moderator for every 81.6 members and 91.8 postss In my opinion these ratios should be touching 200. 5) To avoid having more controllers than needed over limited no of posts and threads and members. Moderating team acitivty: 2 members didnt even visit the site since last 1 month and the other 2 since last 2 months (pathetic) 6) Check and balance on the performance of moderators. Setting a time limit after which the moderator will lose the right to be a moderator. Voting for moderators should be done after some time in SEFP. Male/Female participation is: 99% : 1% . Additionally all that 1% posts from females is only from 1 member out of 8.. 7) Not an important issue as this is STRUCTURAL engineering not the ARCHITECTURE or INTERIOR DESIGNING but still a surprising fact. I wish if we can make it 2%???? 93% of total members have made NO POST at all! Zero Post .....0.0...93% Inactive users.....Lets put a min limit for a member to stay a member for SEFP. If a new member doesnt post, say 5 times in 2 weeks...assume...the member should be deleted automatically! 8) It will ensure more activity and realistic ratios for SEFP activities based on active members not just on inactive members. We will have nice people instead of bunch of useless spammers and trial downloaders. The list can go on! like the percentage of different threads etc but for the time being we need more members and more posts. Lets get the results asap. I think we should do it in a more organized way. Giving moderators their responsibility to do something for forum and to set targets monthly or every other month lets say! and to achieve them. I would highly recommend the ADMIN to take this suggestion seriously!

Rana all the points that you mentioned are right just one suggestion that instead of cutting down the members its better to encourage them by sending emails or notifications that they should comment and take active part. As in many cases many people want to say something or even they know but they are shy to write that it might be wrong so what everyone will say ...so they just come read some usefull stuff and go away so by deleting such members i think it will be harsh as this forum means learning but still admin can take notice of your suggestions... Rest i must say good analysis a meaningful one....

It a great post. Rana, talk to me on skype this coming weekend. Guys please add your suggestions down. I will remove the inactive mods next week and decide an action plan streamlined with your suggestions. Many Thanks

very tough English and facts and figures have headache while reading all this Rana sir very nice suggestions and i hope the Admin will have most of the things in his mind already and some plan for it but might be waiting for appropriate time to take action(actually i had a lil conversation with him). 1-inactive members may be notified by email to participate rather urged to. 2-inactive moderators may also asked that why they are not visiting.a rule should be made that a moderator must visit the assigned section and improve it by writing some article per week or some activity which make that section interesting and within moderators there may be some competition for the sake of improvement and knowledge transfer and sharing. 3-members should not be automatically deleted they should be persuaded to participate better try to make them active members.if you have decided to delete inactive members at least give them some more time and some notifications after that go ahead,make some auto database that automatically notify the members that they should participate or there membership be confiscated. 4-senior members should be contacted personally by admin or mods and requested to share some informational and technical articles per week or fortnightly or monthly.for senior engineers and faculty members may have different criteria than other members. 5-there are no books or other material like codes etc. shared yet which can increase the activity in the forum. Thanx and if someone have headache after reading i apologise in anticipation.

its a chapter from a book about pile design. Good read. design-of-piled-foundation.pdf