This post was triggered by a spot-on question from Julia Manglitz about my comments on the fourth Rocky River Bridge. The main structure of that bridge consists of unreinforced concrete arches, and Julia asked “I’m curious about any thoughts you have on the relative durability of reinforced versus non? It seems as though reinforcement corrosion …
I read “What Is the Difference Between Accuracy and Precision?” by Anne Marie Helmenstine yesterday (steered there by Bill Harvey), and of course I immediately started thinking about structural design in that light. I remember one of my professors saying, circa 1985, that our calculations simply weren’t accurate so we shouldn’t be worrying about every decimal …
I keep talking about how engineering moves forward by looking at past mistakes. Sometimes the mistakes are caused by ignorance, in which case it’s often possible to find the event that triggered research to reduce the level of ignorance. For engineers in the US, the St. Louis tornado of May 1896 was an event that …
Last spring I wrote six posts on the topic of modeling. I was thinking about that topic today and realized that I had omitted an important portion of the discussion, so here we are. Since, as I described at some length in the earlier posts, all models are inaccurate to some degree, there is no …
In preparing to write this post I went back and looked, and I’ve written about green roofs a lot. What I haven’t really done is discuss them from the viewpoint of structural engineering, which is of course how I interact with them on a professional level. Everything You Need to Know Before Installing a Green …
