Skip to main content

Welcome To Structural Madness

Structural Engineering is one of the most challenging engineering that one can experience. Undoubtedly building codes have made things much more easier but that is not the limit of this science, but in fact if goes even further.

If you think about structural engineering and your first class of structural mechanics, you always wondered about behavior of materials under different loading, how does bending moment affect a structure and why is shear always so critical. You get pretty confused and always looked for a good source to read about some "intuitive structural engineering". I have suffered through such problems and so I started writing down blogs.


Generally all the blogs about structural engineering talk about design methodology and how building codes define certain things and stuff like that. Well, that is all empirical. But that is now what we will do over here. On this platform we will understand the intuitive portion of structural engineering and discuss at the very basic level. If your basics are clear then everything starts making sense.

Would you like me to impress you with one basic example? So here it is, a basic concept of "Why development length is required in concrete structures?"

Let me give you the most simple example to explain the concept the development. Take your first finger and grab it in the palm of your other hand. Now pull the finger applying as much force as you can. At a certain limit your finger will slip and contact between finder and palm will break. But suppose if your finger is too long or the grip between the finger and the palm is immense such that if you pull your finger then the only way to get your other hand free is breaking up your finger. That is the base concept of development length.

The bond between steel and concrete is somewhat similar. We cannot have a continuous bar of steel throughout the structure. There are always connections, joints and splices. If we do not provide development length, then at the location of these critical areas the structure will fail easily. But if we provide sufficient amount of length to give a continuity to the strength of the structure then the strength will be similar everywhere. 

This is how we are going to discuss structural engineering over here. Taking very basic cases and understanding and applying them to a structure without breaking the laws of physics. Once we have covered all these basic concepts, we will discuss about building codes and clauses, nonlinear response history analysis, different software to use in structural engineering, artificial intelligence and neural networks and programming in structural engineering.

This is why the name of our blog is "Structural Madness". It clearly depicts the craziness towards the field. I do not consider this as my work, but instead as my hobby and passion.


So let's get started with our blog, shall we?

Comments

  1. Nice!!This blog is useful for us.

    John Smith from
    https://www.bci.edu.bd/

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi Jinal, I landed to your blog through your intuitive answers in Quora. I look forward to reading interesting stuffs. Have a great day !

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hi jinal, i have completed my degree in 2016 and worked on site since them i wish to go on structural field but cannot figure out how should I. Hope you can help me

    ReplyDelete
  4. My son is a 12 year old going into 7th grade and he is working on a science project that has to do with how high rise structures of different shapes react to wind loads. Would this be something you could advise him on and how a 7th grader could test? We have styrofoam structures roughly 3 feet tall by 1 ft wide in the shapes of a plus, a square, a star and a triangle.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes, of course. Just send us an email on structuralmadness(at)gmail(dot)com and we will be happy to help him out. Thanks

      Delete
  5. It is interesting bro..
    can you please make a video about vibration analysis basics.
    Vibrations and test in automobles also

    ReplyDelete
  6. Sir can you tell me which books should I refer to learn structural engineering from basic level and also to become perfect in it?

    ReplyDelete
  7. I am also aiming to do Masters in Structural Engineering and also have a blog on civil engineering and gives day to day info of this stream...
    Blog: https://thecoreengineers.blogspot.com

    ReplyDelete
  8. Hi Jinal,

    I was very informative details about structural designing and structural engineering.
    I really liked the way you explain about the steel and concrete.

    Do write such awesome posts about structural designing.
    I did come across as website that might be useful for your audience.

    Procedure of building a House: https://architects4design.com

    How to Calculate construction cost by using cost calculator tool: https://architects4design.com/cost-of-construction-in-bangalore/

    Hope these two links will help your readers to know more related to architecture and especially the calculator which helps to calculate the cost.

    Thnak you.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Hi Jinal,

    I always find your topic intriguingly interesting. Can you advice me if there's a way to compute the vibration effect of pile driving to a house nearby? Hope to hear your exciting answer to this. Thanks. Be safe.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Hello I'm structural engineering student and curious about dynamic behavior of structure, I have one question,
    If we try to draw out relationships between height of buildings and magnitude of earthquake,
    Higher the magnitude will leads to lower frequency and higher time periods, so Is it correct that high rise buildings are more vulnerable in high magnitude earthquakes because of resonance? Or we need to look forward to any other consideration before coming to that conclusion.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hello Jasmin, I think you have either read some incorrect information on relationship between building height and magnitude of earthquake. The frequency content of the ground motion depends on the distance of site from the fault, type of soil and fault directivity effects. It has hardly anything to do with the magnitude of earthquake.

      Magnitude just describes the energy dissipated by the fault, in terms of fault length and ground motion duration.

      Higher magnitude typically either is a direct result of long duration of earthquake or high PGAs and not the frequency content. A tall building is susceptible to both high as well as low frequency vibrations. Low frequency vibrations will lead to large displacement demands in the building while high frequency vibrations will lead to distortions as well as higher mode effects and increased floor accelerations in the tall buildings.

      I hope this helps!

      Delete
    2. thank you sir, this really helped.

      Delete
  11. The example you gave is really madness but it works better than bookish language.

    ReplyDelete
  12. That's good work indeed. One item that is never really taught is the design of Structural systems for stability especially against lateral loading. Most texts jump straight into element design. Entry level engineers where I'm from are good with member design but would have a tough time laying out the system as a whole.. Issues with column location selection usually arise. Hope you can cover this.

    ReplyDelete
  13. Thank you for sharing such as nice informative blog. Keep it sharing it will helpful for me. We are a Structural Engineering Design Consultancy based in Auckland, New Zealand. We carry out design and construction supervision services all around New Zealand.
    Lightweight Structures Design

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What is a Response Reduction factor?

In our previous blogs we discussed about  Response Spectrum Analysis ,  Earthquake and Energy Dissipation  as well as  Ductility demand in structures during seismic loading . In response spectrum analysis topics like mode shapes, modal mass participation factors, derivation of response spectrum we discussed. In earthquake vs energy dissipation blog, we talked about energy dissipated from buildings through strain energy, inelastic energy, hysteresis, damping and ductility. In ductility demand we discussed about importance of ductile detailing and how it helps a building to work during earthquakes just like a marathon runner during long runs.  Generally inelastic energy dissipation, damping energy, ductility demand and ductility capacity, hysteresis loops are all captured when a nonlinear model is built, and time history analysis is performed for the structure. But to do nonlinear time history analysis, it takes a long time to build a model. The performance evaluation and result ve

Ductility and Elasticity

Ductility and elasticity,the two most important terms that are discussed frequently in structural engineering. Elasticity defines about how much the material is elastic, that is to which extent the deformations are proportional to the forces applied on the material. While ductility defines the capability of the material to get itself stretched beyond the elastic zone. Let me explain this by taking a real life example. Take a two different material, a rubber band and a very thin steel or copper wire.  Pull the rubber with your hands by applying the force in exactly opposite direction, and force means a tiny amount of pull. You will notice that the mount of deformations caused by the small pull is very large, but when you leave the rubber band it will come back to it's original position. This means that the rubber band is elastic in nature. Oh, now you got something in your bucket. But wait, here comes the question. Till what magnitude of force can rubber band behave in such

Possible types of failures in a steel structure

We, structural engineers design all the members of a building, whether it might be a column, beam, a tie member or a strut anything, but we design it to resist certain forces. We predict a load, calculate forces in different members and design them member to resist a particular load. But sometimes because of some undetermined or unpredicted load the forced in certain members increase to a value which it cannot withstand and the LObmember fails. But what are the different possibilities of failure? How can a member fail? Don't worry, here is what we are going to talk about. The possible types of failures in steel structures. Steel is a ductile material and to build a structure using steel is like setting up a huge Jigsaw puzzle. You have 1000 different members and you need to connect them and tada..!! Your structure is up. But it is not as simple as it is visible. Steel being a very strong material  leads to slender members. Now you can imagine the difficulties associated with it