Bridge Engineering Visualization
Had I little walkabout around my neighborhood on a beautiful afternoon. We have a couple of bridges nearby. A 120 foot prefab truss that replaced a cool home built suspension bridge. (flood damaged)
A couple of older railroad bridges. (nothing is that old in America)
And a fracture critical road bridge.
The Happy Pontist pointed to the University of Bath’s bridge conference. (I’m getting the feeling I should just point this blog toward the pontist and start working in the yard.)
The website presents 39 papers by engineering students, reviewing different bridges in terms of aesthetics, with some general structural calculations thrown in for good measure.
I read the paper on the Leonard P. Zakim bridge, by N. Vadgama and the one on the Saint Anthony Falls bridge, by T. THorp. Both well written papers with some interesting images that I had not seen before. One of the things I am trying to learn is exactly what the papers are attempting, how to develop a framework for judging the success of a structure. (aahhh what defines success)
As I am learning, writing an effective critique is difficult.
Sitting in diversity training today, I was thinking bridge design thoughts.
You could add more but you get the idea. Design takes a lot of thought. Go here for pretty bridge pictures instead.
A few years back I wanted to publish a book of structural engineering problems to sell to students. So I bought a pack of 10 Internationa Standard Book Numbers (isbn) for $250 dollars and started a publishing company. The first book had a limited run of 50 copies which I sold through the local university bookstore.
I made all the books myself, utilizing a grill hot plate to make the glue melt on the cover and spine. (Somewhat like this but I used hot glue sticks) The books were a little bigger than paperbacks but had the same type of binding. I used one of my isbn numbers and volia, instant vanity publisher.
My second book was made by Blurb. Blurb has software that allows you to place images and text into predefined templates for publishing through their online service. Since I already had isbn barcodes, it was a simple matter of adding one and vanity book two was born. The great thing about my second book was that it was deemed worthy enough to make it into the Keosauqua library and my local university library collection.
The downside of using Blurb was the final version of the book resides on their system and I can only buy books through them unless I take the time to reformat the book. The next thing I am going to try is a service called Magcloud for publishing magazines.
Some random thoughts on a beautiful Sunday morning.
Photo by kalleboo - flickr
It would be fun to have a round table discussion about what makes an engineer, an engineer and if engineers should be on the same level as architects (doctors?)…
Update: one more thought. Is it possible for an engineer to volunteer their engineering knowledge in their own country? Doctors and Architects volunteer but engineers?
The Infrastructurist is a new website with some good articles.
Two things, I just started teaching the summer session of concrete design and I also have been working on concept statements for bridge repairs utilizing new stimulus funding. What do these things have in common? Well, in teaching, I try to interject real life situations into the class and one of them is how engineers will get paid for their work.
Chris Wise, from Expedition Engineering, (their website layout is just cool) wrote about fee structures for engineers in the new issue of “Building” (an online magazine) 
Mr. Wise suggests that fees should be based on engineering talent and not on an some nebulous percentage of the project. He argues that agencies should be “commissioning designers in a way that knowingly selects them for their talent not for their convenience.”
I have the same dream but I can see how this is a problem. How do you then judge engineers on talent? As a firm you need jobs to develop your talent before you could “show” your talent. I agree the fee structure does not always select the best engineers and may discourage innovation.
Mr. Wise’s suggestion of a talent-based system would of course benefit his firm because of their cutting edge approach. But would they be the best value for a repair project? What is the best value?
I would love to work under a talent-based system (I have an ego) because it would mean the higher I reached as an engineer the more work I would get.
I finally found a cool engineering company, with a Flash website and a blog!
Expedition Engineering does everything from engineering to planning, teaching, environmental, artistic and cultural projects. And bridges!
Lets see..I do,
Successful like Expedition Engineering – well…I’m working on it…..
I don’t want to make this the Keosauqua 24 hour news channel but I would like to wrap it up with some of the success and failures. (Failure is a strong word, more like lost opportunities)
1) Success #1 – Public participation
I think the biggest success of the project was the strong public participation in the design. We had a number of public meetings, with great give and take discussions, along with a small bridge group that helped steer the details of the project. The bridge group would then spread the word throughout the community about what was happening with the bridge.
We also had a grand opening (inside because it was so cold) for the new bridge, with the Mayor, contractor, DOT staff and local citizens.
1) Failure – Building on success
The biggest “failure”, in my view, was not utilizing all the expertise gained from this design on another project or using it as a springboard for new policies throughout our state. While this project was small in comparison to other bridges throughout the country it was really a new way of doing things. Allowing the designer to interact and work with the customer proved invaluable to the final design. Structural Engineers should be out there instead of just staying in the office and doing the calculations……
