Welcome to a rare instance when this column has nothing to do with engineering or philosophy!
Ever since I spent several days in New Mexico with my family during a vacation last summer, I feel like the abundant sunshine and thin, dry air have put me under some kind of spell. …
Starting in 2008, members of the project team, along with others, performed tests to show that the American Concrete Institute (ACI) 318-11 Appendix D concrete shear capacities for steel anchor bolts with small edge distances connected to wood sill plates were extremely low compared to actual tested values. …
The past decades have seen major progress toward the broad utilization of advanced nonlinear analysis methods for seismic design. Many of us have witnessed continual development and evolution of the modern standard for nonlinear seismic design – ASCE 41, now titled Seismic Evaluation and Retrofit of Existing Buildings. …
Seismic design of buildings using repetitively framed CFS (CFS) members has largely been enabled through a series of dedicated tests conducted on shear walls and compiled for convenient use in the AISI-S213 standard, supported through the seismic response modification coefficients and procedures in ASCE 7. …
The Timber Tower Research Project by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, LLP (SOM) was publically released in June of 2013, and is available for download at SOM’s website. The goal of the research project was to develop a structural system for tall buildings that uses mass timber as the main structural material and minimizes the embodied carbon footprint of the building. …
Theodore Burr had just finished his Union Bridge in Waterford, NY (STRUCTURE, February 2014) when he was called to Trenton, New Jersey to build a toll bridge across the Delaware River just above the falls. …
Steel fabricators have been using three dimensional models to detail structural steel for many years now. In many modern shops, all information required for the fabrication of a project is included in the detailed model, including dimensional information, material grades, piece marks and specification of welds. …
The more than three decades that have passed since the collapse of hanging walkways at Kansas City’s Hyatt Regency Hotel have turned that catastrophe into the textbook cautionary tale for structural engineers. No other collapse (save maybe the World Trade Center) has led me to as many discussions within and out of the profession. …
Safety of exterior elevated decks, balconies and porches continues to be an important national issue. Section 1604.8.3 of the 2009 International Building Code (IBC) states that decks shall be anchored to the primary structure and designed for both vertical and lateral loads. The focus of this article is to address knowledge gaps on the performance of decks subjected to lateral loading. …
Over the past few decades, significant advances have been made in the areas of earthquake engineering and seismic design. A growing database of strong motion records, refined ground motion attenuation relationships, and probabilistic seismic hazard methodologies have led to an improved design basis for seismic events. …