A Wall Design Group is a user-assigned collection of Walls (Walls are created in RAM Modeler). The RAM Concrete Wall module places no restrictions on the manner in which Walls can be grouped into Wall Design Groups. A single Wall Design Group may contain Walls that are at different levels, not in contact with one another, or both.

The purpose of a Wall Design Group is to divide the wall system in the RAM model into a number of individual wall groups, cores, or stacks that can be designed separately from one another. The Wall Design Group can be thought of as any collection of walls for which the reinforcement can be completely designed and all code checks performed independently of any other wall in the building (see Figure below).

A detailed list of the effects of a Wall Design Group assignment is given below:

• All strength and prescriptive code checks will be evaluated for one Wall Design Group at a time.
• Any code checks that involve wall or opening geometry will consider only the geometry within the respective Wall Design Group.
• All Section Cuts that are automatically generated will not extend past a Wall Design Group boundary.
• Any user assigned Section Cuts are not allowed to extend past the Wall Design Group boundary.
• Coupling Beams may not extend across two or more Wall Design Groups.
• When executing the View/Update command, only the design information pertaining to the selected Wall Design Group will be displayed, reported, and available for editing.
• All optimized reinforcement generated by the RAM Concrete Wall module will be cut off at the Wall Design Group boundaries.
• When converting Bar Patterns into actual reinforcing bars, the Wall Design Group boundaries serve as edges of the bar pattern being placed.