Nothing at all to do with sheep...
Nothing at all to do with sheep...
One thing that irks me about a lot of spreadsheets I’ve seen created over the years is the fact that the inputs for something that can be visualised are hidden behind a few numbers in cells. No visual representations of…
Minimum steel, love it or hate it, we have minimums for a reason even if it seems like overkill sometimes given that we may have very low demands. This post will demonstrate why (I hope) we are required to comply…
Well, one person’s world of torsion anyway… In this post I’ll show how to use Mathematica to check some derivatives of torsion relationships. Mathematica is an analysis/computational tool by Wolfram. Now if you had to pony up the dollars for…
In this post we’ll try demystify CL 5.6.4 part b, what the hell does it really mean? Well this is my take on it anyway… I can’t say for certain I’m correct as I’ve never seen anyone else use it,…
So if you’ve been following along with this series you now hopefully know a little bit more about some of the methods involved in undertaking buckling analyses. Pat yourself on the back for making it this far through my ramblings…
In the last post we looked at the basic method of undertaking a flexural buckling analysis using Mastan2 and interpretation of the results. We compared a couple of the built-in equations in AS4100 & NZS3404 relating to the moment modification…
In the last post in this series we looked at a semi-real scenario where a rational elastic buckling analysis was undertaken in which we were able to determine the axial capacity of a system of members. The exact type of…
In part 1 of this series, we briefly explored the requirements related to calculating the capacity of a column via the use of a buckling analysis. Introducing the general methodology to follow and showing agreement with the normal hand methods…
This post was inspired by a rather epic post at Eng-Tips forum, which came out of a seemingly simple request for some help on the segment length to consider for a continuous beam design to AS4100 (the Australian Steel code).…
It’s a question that seems to come up from time to time in my experience, can you take the point of inflection as a point of lateral restraint for the restraint of structural steel members under flexural forces? The answer…
Excel does many things well, but it goes without saying many things could be vastly improved, or at the very least shown a bit of love by Microsoft. One particular thing in Excel that that causes me some frustration is…
Part 9 – Verification Part of the verification process in development of a spreadsheet or software tool involves what I like to term the process of idiot proofing. Some end users are considered as potential idiots, asking yourself to think…
Often in engineering you need to make simplification in analyses that make your life easier, often applying some judgement based on experience that involves some simplification in the analysis of a structure for example. Sometimes you do this in the…
This blog post is inspired by a recent post which I responded to on the EngTips forum. The question was related to finding the warping constant of back to back cold formed channels. The poster was querying the validity of…
When setting up the WordPress software on which this blog runs, I wanted it to be secure, who wouldn’t. I mean nothing can be guaranteed as being 100% secure, but we can certainly do our best to address known weaknesses…
Part 8 – Documentation, the Necessary Evil Love it or hate it, I’ve already decided documentation is required so you are stuck with it. Code comments and docstrings aside, part of the planned documentation is this series of blog posts…