Analysing structures without recourse to numbers is vital for engineers to have a basic appreciation of structural behaviour, and to help identify errors in computer input from the output. Dr David Brohn (New Paradigm Solutions and author of Understanding Structural Analysis) has been an important figure in this field since the late 70s and his important benchmark tests of structural understanding. As part of an e-Training course for the Institution of Structural Engineers, Dr Brohn has developed a video series to teach qualitative analysis. The first three of these are freely available and are very useful:
Peter Rice the famous and brilliant Irish engineer died 20 years ago this year. To celebrate his significant contribution to the global profession of structural engineering, a few new publications/broadcasts have been released. These are a must read/watch/listen for any structural engineer, but especially Irish students of structural engineering!
1. Traces of Peter Rice
Arup have produced a fascinating documentary on his work. The film examines Peter’s approach to engineering and to design and shows how his way of working broadened the horizons for both engineers and architects in his lifetime, a legacy that is still relevant today.
2. Traces of Peter Rice (book)
To accompany the Arup exhibition, this book is a gathering of essays in tribute to the life and achievements of a remarkable Irish- born structural engineer Peter Rice (1935-1992), ‘perhaps the most influential of the 20th century’. It can be got here: http://www.amazon.com/Traces-Peter-Rice-Kevin-Barry/dp/1843513862.
3. Remembering Peter Rice
The RTE Radio 1 Arts Tonight documentary can be listed to here. It features a range of well-known architects, but unfortunately, no engineer.
4. Arup Exhibition – Traces of Peter Rice
The exhibition will close in London on 5 April and begin touring France and Ireland, as follows:
The exhibition will tour to the Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris from the 14 May 2013 until the 28 June 2013 and then to the Farmleigh Gallery, Dublin between 10 October 2013 and 23 December 2013.
Here’s an amazing false colour image of a micro crack in steel, viewed through an electron microscope. Through repeated load cycles such cracks get bigger and bigger with the bulb of plastic material at the crack tip getting larger and larger. The resulting stress intensification around the crack causes more plasticity accentuating the process. If the number of cycles is large enough at a particular stress range, the specimen can eventually fail then in fatigue.
Well the Bridge and Concrete Research in Ireland (BCRI) conference, held on 6/7 September 2012, and co-chaired by myself and Dr Alan O’Connor of Trinity College Dublin seemed to go very well. There has been very positive feedback and some very good suggestions for future events.
I won the Young Researcher Award (from an independent panel of course!), and it was jointly award to Dr Jamie Goggins of NUI Galway. The ‘Young Researcher Award’ was established by the BCRI conference to recognise the work of researchers who are aged less than 35 years and who have made substantial contribution to knowledge in the field; have achieved international esteem; and have developed an independent research career. It is the only award of its kind on the island of Ireland and this year was presented for the first time.
Dublin Institute of Technology is very pleased with this (as am I!) and it made the home page of the website on 18 September 2012 (see below).
For more information see the conference website www.bcri.ie and the DIT news page for the item here.
On 27 May 2012 San Franciscans showed the world just how much the Golden Gate bridge means to them with an amazing fireworks display to celebrate 75 years of service. At the time it was built it was the longest bridge in the world and many said it could not be done. Having visited it and walked over and back (there is no bus stop the other side!), it really is a remarkable structure and location.
Ezra Shaw, Getty Images
To put it in context, when the bridge was designed and built:
There were no calculators – as we know them now, “calculators” in the 1930s were office clerks who would spend months solving a single linear system of equations, as is required for an indeterminate structure such as this. This can be accomplished in seconds now even on the cheapest laptop. The command in Matlab is “x = Ab”. We have it easy.
There were no total stations – setting the bridge out was done with theodolites and good eyesight! Coordinates, angles, and distances were all calculated manually. There were no laser sights or satellites to check the GPS coordinates of the reference points.
There was no Microsoft Project – planning and delivery of such a complex project was again carried out manually with (obviously) no help from a computer. Network path analysis was in its infancy, and yet the bridge was built in a nifty 51 months.
There was no limit state design or partial factor format codes of practice – instead allowable stress design was used, with far less information available on the material performance under cyclic and dynamic loading than we have today. Aerodynamic forces were not understood nor worried about – the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse was a decade later.
Finally, and just to get my research in, there was of course no traffic microsimulation assessment of the loading that the traffic would impart to the bridge. This would come nearly 75 years later!
The main span is 1280.2 m. The current longest span is 1991 m (Akashi Kaikyo Bridge, which I also had the pleasure of visiting), which is only 50% longer approximately, and was achieved without any of the above restrictions. In this context, the designers and builders of this bridge, and many others like it at the time, certainly deserve an awe and reverence for their achievements. But surely, don’t many other bridges deserve this attention? We trust our lives every day to their builders and the materials, and our economies could not function without them. It is no surprise that “to build bridges” is a very positive metaphor.
