Descon 8 designs a standard steel connection from end to end. Some details go past what Descon models: a beam web that cannot carry the reaction, a plate Descon has no input for, a check from another part of the specification. Export to Nerv takes the design across, the front view and the whole calculation together, so you can change both and keep every number live.
This page is a worked example. It follows one shear connection from a new Descon design to a finished calculation package in Nerv. The reaction is more than the beam's web can carry, so Descon designs it as far as it can and flags what fails. We finish it in Nerv: the detail and the beam's own checks by hand, the rest by asking Nerv's assistant in one sentence, and then by reading what it wrote and correcting it, as you would a colleague's calculation. The screenshots are from Descon 8.1.0.014 and Nerv as of October 2026.
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The connection
A W16X26 beam frames into the flange of a W14X90 column with a single plate shear connection. The reaction is 120 kips, factored, which is more than the beam itself can take: its web's design shear strength is φVn = 105.98 kips, and at a line of bolt holes less again. The beam stays a W16X26. The fix is to make its web deeper where it needs to be, at the support.
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Joint | Beam to column flange (Beam and/or Brace to Column, column web in plane) |
| Code and method | AISC 360-22 (Descon's AISC16), LRFD |
| Column | W14X90, A992 |
| Right beam | W16X26, A992, single plate shear connection |
| Reaction | V = 120 kips |
| Bolts | 7/8" A325-N, standard holes, one vertical line of four rows: as many as fit the W16X26 web |
| Plate | 5/8" A36, held at that thickness |
Design it in Descon 8
Start a new design. On the DESIGN tab of the ribbon, pick AISC16 and LRFD. The joint is Beam and/or Brace to Column, with the column's web orientation In Plane: a beam framing into the column flange.
With Member set to Column, type W14X90 in Section and press Enter. Switch Member to Right Side Beam and type W16X26. Set Shear Connection to Single Plate and V (Shear) to 120 kips.
Open the single plate form with the button beside Shear Connection. Under Bolt Data, press the bolt button and pick 7/8" bolts. Set Vertical Lines of Bolts to 1 and Number of Rows of Bolts to 4, and set the plate Thickness to 0.625, ticking the box beside each so Descon keeps them. Four rows at 3" is all the W16X26 web has room for. Descon designs the rest: the plate's length, the welds, the edge distances.
Why hold the plate? Left to itself at 120 kips, Descon thickens it to 7/8" with 9/16" welds, flags those welds as running into the beam web, and still fails: four bolts cap what the connection can deliver, whatever the plate. At 5/8" the plate is what a fabricator would make, and what fails is what really runs out.
What fails
Descon sizes the plate at 5/8" × 4" × 11-1/4", A36, with 3/8" fillet welds to the column, and the report button says REPORT (NG: 6):
| Check | Strength | Against |
|---|---|---|
| 1.c Bolt shear, four bolts | 90.30 kips | 120 |
| 1.d.1 Beam web, shear yielding | 105.98 kips | 120 |
| 1.d.2 Beam web, shear rupture at the bolt line | 85.56 kips | 120 |
| 1.e.2 Plate, shear rupture | 118.27 kips | 120 |
| 1.e.5 Bolt bearing on the plate | 87.57 kips | 120 |
| 1.f Bolt bearing on the beam web | 90.30 kips | 120 |
Two of the six are the beam itself. The other four come down to four bolts and an 11-1/4" plate, and a fifth bolt will not fit in the web. The fix: cut the bottom flange flush with the web for 4" at the support, weld a 3/8" plate under the beam there to make the web deeper, and run the shear plate down over it with two more bolts. Descon has no input for that detail. Nerv does.
Export to Nerv
Save the design first (here, W16X26 to W14X90). The Nerv project is named after the file, and a design that was never saved arrives as Drawing.
On the TOOLS tab, press Export to Nerv (it is marked beta). The same button is on the toolbar at the top left. Descon sends the design and opens it in your web browser. There is nothing to sign in to: your Descon account is your Nerv account, the browser arrives signed in, and the design is kept as one of your company's Nerv projects.
If Nerv cannot be reached, Descon offers to save the design as a .nerv.json file instead, which Open in Nerv reads the same way. The export is one way: nothing in Nerv is written back to your .dsn.
What arrives in Nerv
Nerv opens on the Pad, its calculation pad: sheets of grid paper with a title block, one line of working per row, OK or NG in the margin. Two things come over.
Descon's front view, as a sketch. The linework, the callouts, the dimensions and the weld symbols, every one where Descon put it. It is a sketch you can edit, not a picture. Drawings in Nerv are generated from a model, and this design has no model, so the view lives on the pad beside the working.
The calculation, as live working. Descon's report is rebuilt line by line into statements the engine works out, and each one is kept only if it gives the figure Descon printed, to the digits Descon printed. A value is a value: change the reaction and everything that uses it follows. Each section of Descon's report is a section of the pad, listed on the left. Variables and checks are in the panel on the right.
Changing the detail by hand
Click the sketch to edit it. A toolbar appears across its top. Make the block taller with + in its corner, and type a scale of 1:5 in the box under the toolbar so the drawing has room. Then:
| Tool | What it did here |
|---|---|
| ↖ Select | Ctrl+click picks one line out of a part. The bottom flange's inside line, picked and deleted, so it can be drawn again short of the cut. The column is left alone. |
| ╱ Line | Click a point, type a length, Tab, type an angle, Enter; the next line starts where that one ended. The flange's inside line from the beam's far end, 1'-2", and the flange's cut end, 0.345" down. Then the extension plate from the beam's bottom corner: down 6-1/2", across 10", up 6-1/2". Typed lengths are exact; v0 means plumb. |
| ↖ Select, drag | The shear plate's bottom edge, dragged down 8": the plate's sides follow, because lines that meet are tied. |
| ▭ Box | The plate's weld to the column, drawn again down its full length. |
| Ctrl+D | Copies what is selected. The two lower bolts, picked with a crossing box, copied and dragged down to 17" and 20" below the top of the beam, with Alt held so nothing snaps. |
| ↔ Dimension | Snapped to the plate's corners, it says 1'-7 1/4" by itself, and follows if the plate changes again. |
| ✂ Trim, and the line style list | What the shear plate now hides, the beam's bottom edge and the extension's end behind it, trimmed back to the plate's edge and drawn again as hidden lines; the beam end behind it set to hidden. |
| ↗ Callout, and the weld list | A leader from what it points at to where the words go: the flange cut, the extension plate, the added bolts. With a callout selected, the weld list on the toolbar makes it a weld symbol: a bevel groove both sides where the flange is cut flush, a fillet both sides under the flange. Double-click a weld callout for its size and its tail note: PJP, FINISH TO BEAR. |
| fit | Back to the whole drawing. |
Ctrl+Z steps back through the sketch's own edits. Shift holds a line to 15° steps, and Alt drags a point free of what it is tied to.
Changing the calculation by hand
The two NGs that are the beam's own are yours to fix, in Descon's own rows. Go to the Right Side Beam section and find 1.d.1. Click the row dw = 15.7; tw = 0.25, press End, then Enter for a new row under it. A row that starts with an apostrophe is a note. Type the extension's inputs:
' web extension PL3/8 A572 Gr 50 (Fy 50, Fu 65, the beam's), bottom flange cut flush; 2 of the 6 bolts in it
h_ext = 6.5; t_ext = 0.375; N_ext = 2Then click Descon's shear area row and type it again so it counts the extension, and do the same for the net area at the bolt holes:
A = dw*tw + h_ext*t_ext [in²]
Anv = (dw - N*(dh + 0.0625))*tw + (h_ext - N_ext*(dh + 0.0625))*t_ext [in²]The engine works them out as you type: shear yielding φRn = 171.8 kips and shear rupture 134.9 kips, both against 120, and both of Descon's NGs turn OK. Every number on the row is the engine's. You type the formula; the pad prints the values it put in and the answer.
The extension plate is A572 Grade 50, so its Fy and Fu are the beam's. A plate of another grade would need its own in the formulas.
Asking the assistant for the rest
What is left needs checks Descon never had, or had for four bolts and a shorter plate: the six-bolt group, bearing on the extension, the shear plate at its new length, and the extension's welds to the beam. Press AI in the top bar, choose a model (Claude Opus 5.5, here), and ask in one sentence, the way you would ask a colleague:
Please add the missing checks for my new web extension plate and modify the existing checks as appropriate.
Everything else it needs is on the sketch: the bolts, the plate sizes, the welds and their symbols, the note that the extension is finished to bear. The assistant reads the sketch as data, and can look at it as a picture too. It writes the checks as rows, and uses the values already there by name. It does not type the answers: every number on the pad is worked out by the engine. A row that states its own result is refused. Each change is one undo step, so Ctrl+Z takes it back.
Here it reworked the bolt group for six bolts by the elastic method (C = 5.77), Descon's plate checks for six bolts and a 1'-7 1/4" plate, and the bearing rows Descon had typed, and added a section for the extension plate: its edge distances, bearing on it, the finished-to-bear top edge, its fillets, and bending where the flange is cut. Twenty-seven of twenty-seven checks pass.
Judging what it wrote
Twenty-seven OKs is where the engineer's work starts, not where it ends. Step through what changed, row by row, as you would a colleague's calculation. Two things stood out here.
A check that was missing. The extension's welds were checked for the bolt group's sideways force, but not for the shear flow along the joint as the beam bends. One sentence:
Please also check the PJP and the fillets for the shear flow along the extension-to-beam joint.
It added the shear flow, VQ/I = 5.84 kips/in, and the checks for both welds. The fillets pass. The PJP showed NG at 1.484, and reading why, it had taken the 1/8" throat on one side of the web only.
An assumption that was wrong. The weld symbol on the sketch says both sides. One more sentence:
The PJP is both sides per the weld symbol, so use 1/8 on each side of the web.
With both throats the weld is good for 7.875 kips/in, and the web's base metal, 7.31 kips/in, governs: OK at 0.799. Every check on the pad passes, 31 of 31. The assistant also noted that two 1/8" throats on a 1/4" web are the whole web, a complete-penetration joint in effect, which the weld symbol and the joint preparation should say.
That is the way to use it. The assistant writes the working quickly, and the engineer reads it and decides. If you would make a different assumption, say so, or change the row yourself: everything after it follows. The assistant runs on Nerv's AI credits; a weekly allowance comes with every account, and the portal shows what is left.
Printing the package
Package view, on the left, assembles the calculation package: a cover, the contents, every section as it stands now (Descon's, with your edits, and the new checks), and the variable summary. PDF saves it, and Print prints it at letter size.
Where to go next in Nerv
Everything above lives in one Nerv document, and the pad is only one way of looking at it. From here:
- Tour, in the top bar, walks through the model, the pad, the drawings and the bill of materials in a few minutes.
- Model is where a building is drawn: grids and levels, members, walls, decks. Parts relate to what they land on, and the analysis runs from them.
- Drawings are generated from the model, so they change when it does.
- Projects lists your company's Nerv projects, including every design you have exported from Descon.
- The AI panel works on the model as well as the pad: "add a W12X26 beam between C1 and C2 at the roof", "why does B3 fail?"
Common questions
Do I need a separate Nerv account?
No. Your Descon account is your Nerv account, and Export to Nerv signs you in.
Does anything I change in Nerv go back to Descon?
No. The export is one way. The .dsn is unchanged, and Descon's report stays what Descon calculated. The pad says so on each section it brought over.
Can I export without an internet connection?
Descon offers to save the design as a .nerv.json file instead. Open it in Nerv later with Open.
Are Descon's numbers exactly what Descon printed?
Yes, on the day of the export. Every statement is checked to reproduce Descon's printed figure before it is kept. A few values Descon takes from tables come over as inputs carrying Descon's number. They are right as exported, but they do not follow an edit, and the pad marks them as given.
Does the assistant replace the engineer's judgment?
No. It writes working the engine evaluates, quickly and in the open, and it says what it assumed. Deciding whether those assumptions and checks are right, and asking for what is missing, is the engineer's job, as the two corrections above show.
Who can I ask if this page does not cover it?
Use Feedback in Nerv or Send Feedback in Descon, or email support@desconplus.com.