RAM Concept treats walls above the slab similarly to beams. Using "wall-beams" instead of just thickened slab elements has both advantages and disadvantages; overall it is not recommended to model walls above the slab as beams.

Slab elements have two major advantages over wall elements ("wall-beams"):

RAM Concept design strip cross sections automatically integrate the forces across slab elements. Wall-beam elements are ignored in these integrations. Also, RAM Concept provides you many controls over how slab element results can be displayed; wall-beam elements (like wall elements) can only plot their reactions to the slab.

However, as discussed in "Beams," RAM Concept ’s standard slab elements have a torsional stiffness that is proportional to their depth cubed. This can cause a large over-estimation of the torsional stiffness for a very thick slab element if it is adjacent to relatively thin elements. "Wall-beam" elements do not have this problem.

As such, walls above that are modeled as upstand beams should use the "No-torsion" beam setting discussed in "Beams".

When modeling wall-beams, RAM Concept interprets some of the wall element parameters differently. If the wall-beam is not rotationally fixed to the slab then the wall-beam will have zero torsional stiffness. If the wall-beam is not a shear wall then it will have zero axial stiffness. The vertically compressible and rotationally fixed at far end parameters are ignored.

Wall-beam elements have one advantage over slab elements. Slab elements of drastically differing thicknesses in the same structure can cause the automatic plotting controls to show (correctly) huge force variations in and adjacent to thick slab elements and almost no variation within the thin slab element areas. This does not generally happen if walls above are modeled as wall-beams.