Insights worth sharing

Motives for better Engineering

Coulomb's wedge theory
of earth pressure

Explore horizontal earth pressure,
Coulomb's theory, and its applications.
Compare geotechnical results and
understand the trial wedge method's nuances.

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Baltimore bridge collapse:
What structural engineers can do

Explore the technical content on vessel collision
to calculate the annual frequency of bridge component collapse.

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Seismic Isolation in Structural Design:
Concepts and Applications

Introducing the concept of seismic isolation design.

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Advancing FEA: High-Order Triangular Elements Explained

For the previous example, we can use high-order triangular elements. This element has six nodes per element and assumes the displacement is quadratic within an element. Also, each side edge can be curved, as shown.

Advanced Creep Analysis for Two-Span Bridges Explained

Creep Analysis 5 MIDAS Example 

 

 

Analyzing Quadrilateral Elements in Structural FEA

Continuing on to the third part of this multi-part blog, another option is a quadrilateral element. As always, let’s start with an example.

Column Buckling Analysis: Self-Weight Impact Explored

So you have learned about column buckling under a point load applied at the end of the column, do you know if columns can buckle under their self-weight? Let’s explore it and run some analyses using midas Civil.

Innovations in Concrete Arch Bridge Design for Railways

 

Exploring Concrete Shear Equations: θ and β in Design

Concrete Shear Equation

 

Understanding Shear Behavior in Concrete with θ and β

Findings and remarks

 

Optimizing Crack Angles in Concrete Shear Design

Optimum crack angle θ

 

From the previous example, we can catch that there are some possible crack angle ranges for the given εx and vu/f’c. Now our question is which values of θ and β are the optimums? The previous example shows that, without considering longitudinal reinforcements, mostly (not always) the lowest crack angle results in the least number of stirrups. However, with considering longitudinal reinforcements, the optimum crack angle increases. The methodology to find out the optimum crack angle is proposed by Rahal and Collins (Background to the general method of shear design in the 1994 CSA-A23.3 standard, Canadian Journal of Civil Engineering, February 2011).

Structural Shear Analysis: A Full Iteration Approach

Solving the previous example from full iteration

 

Now it’s time to solve the previous example from full iteration. For simplicity, interaction with flexure is not considered. In other words, it is assumed that the status is in a pure shear condition which rarely exists in the real world.

Advanced Composite Section Analysis in Structural Design

Composite Section Analysis

 

Finally we came to the composite section analysis. One of the best examples is from Dr. Gilbert and Dr. Ranzi (Example 5.10, Time-dependent behavious of concrete structures, CRC Press, 2010.)

Suspension Bridge Analysis: Melan & Moisseiff's Insights

The Question

 

Moisseiff's Differential Equations

4th-order differential equation

 

Eq(2) is a 4th-order differential equation, and we can imagine it is not simple to solve.

 

Revolutionizing Suspension Bridge Design: Moisseiff's Impact

4th-order differential equation

 

Suspension Bridge Analysis: Peery & Timoshenko Methods

Analysis of suspension bridges - Peery’s methods use integration

 

To calculate the area of influence lines, Simpson’s method has been applied. Simpson’s method results in a very accurate value if the number of divisions is even and each division has the same length.