Hey RD,
I read it differently...
Having looked at the Salvarinas fabrication and construction paper and the NIST model I'd have to disagree that NIST had no shear studs on the column 79-44 girder.
If you look at fig 11-9 on page 476 you'll see shear studs (as light marks) all along that column. What they didn't do was model them with break elements.
Note that NIST says that the black squares represent "shear studs
& connectors" (emphasis added).
I'm pretty certain that the black squares at both ends of each beam are connectors & all the intermediate squares represent shear studs.
The term "break elements" simply refers to an FEA item ("element") that can be set to fracture at a given amount of either deformation or stress. Normally, its stiffness of each element is given by a combination of the element's material properties, dimensions & loading condition.
When the part fractures, the program sets all the part's element stiffnesses to some tiny percent (about 1/1,000,000th) of its "unfractured" level. You don't set it to zero, because you'd get a bunch of "divide by zero" math errors.
From NCSTAR 1-9 vol 2 page 475-476
This seems to be the opposite of what Superlogicalthinker is saying, i.e- that beam is tied to the floor more securely in the model because it doesn't have break elements on all of its shear studs.
That's my reading of it anyway but I'm not an engineer.
There is, IMO, a real contradiction between what Salvarinas says & what Cantor says. One of them is wrong. I'd bet that NIST got it right.
It's an indictment of thuthers' honesty that they only present half of that story.
Unlike the full-building FEA analysis, this is a small analysis that truthers (with FEA experience) could replicate in short order, with & without the girder studs, to quantify the difference. I fully expect that none of them will put out that effort, but will prefer to continue to cast baseless accusations.
matrix's assertion that "with the girder studs, the girder won't collapse" is absurd. Both because he has zero relevant experience to offer an informed opinion, and by the calculations (especially eqn 4) on page 347 of NCSTAR1-9.
tom