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Welcome to New York!

Penn Station’s East End Gateway

At the corner of Seventh Avenue and 33^rd Street, the East End Gateway provides a new direct connection from the street to Penn Station. This 40-foot-tall steel and glass canopy brings natural light to the Long Island Rail Road concourses below for the first time since the 1960s. Passengers arriving in New York City through the gateway are welcomed by the Empire State Building aligned directly in view. An innovative design and efficient construction allowed this monumental entrance to take on a life of its own above the busiest train station in the Western Hemisphere.

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Dec, 2022 By Alexander Jordan, P.E., AIA and Preetam Biswas, P.E., LEED In Feature Comments 0

A Coordinated Effort

Pre-Construction Planning Leads to Significant Cost Savings

As part of an ongoing campus improvement program, the University of Florida and the University of Florida Police Department in Gainesville, Florida, recently commissioned their new Public Safety Building (PSB) located in the heart of the campus. The 50,792-square-foot three-story PSB consists of concrete tilt-up wall panels for the exterior and is supported by structural steel on the interior. The entire scope of the project also included a 6,931-square-foot renovation of the adjacent existing Centrex Building, which houses the University’s Emergency Management staff and emergency operations dispatch center.

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Dec, 2022 By Dylan Richard, P.E. and Stephen Blumenbaum, P.E. In Feature Comments 0

Putting On the Wizard’s Hat

The Mid-Manhattan Library Expansion

The New York Public Library (NYPL) system has served New York City since 1895, providing, as noted on its website, “free books, information, ideas, and education for all New Yorkers.” While many people may picture the grand marble façade and imposing lions of the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building (SASB) at Bryant Park (famously featured in Ghostbusters, among other movies and pop culture), SASB has been solely a research library since 1970. In that year, the circulating division of the branch, the part of the library that allows checking out books and materials, moved across the street to the upper floors of the Arnold Constable & Co. department store. This new branch was named the Mid-Manhattan Library.

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Dec, 2022 By Paul Evans, P.E., S.E. In Feature Comments 0

WHY? WHY? WHY?

We each face thousands of decisions in our lives. I want to share three of my decisions relative to my practice of structural engineering in the hope that you might find something in common.

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Dec, 2022 By Jon Magnusson, P.E., S.E., Hon.AIA, F.SEI, Dist.M.ASCE In Editorial Comments 1

Designing for Resilience

Part 1

This two-part series discusses resilience for engineering design practice. Part 1 includes an overview of the ASCE Code of Ethics, resilience concepts for design practice, and how the ASCE Report Card addresses resilience.

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Dec, 2022 By SEI Board of Governors Resilience Committee In Structural Resilience Comments 0

Engineering Experts Investigate Damages in Ukraine…

While Airstrikes Rain Across the City of Kyiv

On October 10, 2022, Russia escalated its war against Ukraine with the largest wave of airstrikes against civilian infrastructure since the invasion began last February. Targets included energy utilities, apartment blocks, and houses. Dr. Kit Miyamoto led a team of global engineering experts working with the U.N. in Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, to assess infrastructure damages caused by the war.

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Dec, 2022 By H. Kit Miyamoto, Ph.D., S.E. In Engineer's Notebook Comments 0

Reducing FEM Solution Errors with Quad Precision Arithmetic

Numbers in computers can only be represented by a fixed number of digits. The predominant number type in Finite Element Method (FEM) software packages is Double-Precision, which is 8 bytes in size. This gives about 15 digits of accuracy. However, during the solution of FEM equations, numerical difficulties or errors may be encountered in certain modeling scenarios due to truncation and round-off errors. The introduction of the Quad-Precision number type, 16 bytes in size providing about a 34-digit accuracy, can reduce FEM solution errors. The author presents a few examples to illustrate the differences in using Double Precision and Quad Precision numbers.

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Dec, 2022 By Junlin Xu In Structural Analysis Comments 0

New Specification for the Design of Structural Stainless Steel

Two New Documents Support Designing with Stainless Steel

With the increasing focus on resilience, interest in stainless steel has likewise grown. As part of that growth, a new design specification for structural stainless steel and a new companion code of standard practice were approved by AISC in 2021. These two documents, Specification for Structural Stainless Steel Buildings (ANSI/AISC 370-21) and Code of Standard Practice for Structural Stainless Steel Buildings (AISC 313-21), are the first standards in the U.S. to address hot-rolled, extruded, and welded stainless steel sections. The new specification (AISC 370) builds on the first edition of AISC Design Guide 27: Structural Stainless Steel, published in 2013, updating it to incorporate the results of the latest worldwide research on the behavior of stainless steel structural elements. In addition, a new edition of AISC Design Guide 27 was published in April 2022, with extensive tables and supporting material to supplement the AISC 370 specification.

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Dec, 2022 By Benjamin R. Baer, P.E, S.E. In Structural Specifications Comments 0

Automation and the Future of Structural Engineering – Installment 5

Concluding our series on automation – December 2021 (Installment 1), March 2022 (2), June 2022 (3), September 2022 (4) – I sat down (virtually) in July 2022 with two more industry experts in innovation: Dr. Erica Fischer, Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering at Oregon State University; and Ilana Danzig, Associate Principal at Aspect Structural Engineers. Below are highlights from our discussion.

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Dec, 2022 By Eytan Solomon, P.E., LEED AP In InFocus Comments 0

It Takes a Disaster… or maybe not?

Building “Bridges” to a More Resilient Society

Are clients (and the general population) aware of how the infrastructure behaves when subjected to extreme events, the risks, and the consequences – and, more importantly, if they are, do they care? One can answer these questions with a categorically confident: “It depends!”

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Dec, 2022 By Michel Bruneau, Ph.D., P. Eng. In Structural Performance Comments 0

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