GOOD PROCEDURE IN THE DESIGN PROCESS

Designing

1. Produce a good preliminary key, with preliminary beam sizing and fairly firm structural system and beam naming. Beam naming should be treated like Identity Card number, cannot be changed but can be omitted.
2. Produce an A3 size for design documentation together with A3 architectural drawings.
3. Produce a hardcopy, which is big enough to mark loading.
4. Do the minor beam (tertiary or secondary beam) first. Once completed, marked point load into the drawings. In this way, no important point load will be missed. Further, when more point load is being put in, try to compare with other to sense for gloss error. If suspect, go back to the calculation. In the way, the structural sense wills slowly being developed.
5. Coloured the completed beam with light colour to mark the small achievement and step forward.
6. Learn to enjoy the design process.

Detailing

1. Produce a hardcopy, which is big enough to mark loading.
2. For each beam done, mark the steel bar for support and mid span, converted into equivalent number of Y25 bar (or any bar size).
3. Colour the completed beam with light colour to mark the small achievement and step forward.
4. Compare with other completed beam periodically or when doubt arise, try to sense gloss error. If suspect, go back to the calculation. In the way, the structural sense will slowly being further developed.

A strong sense of possible error can be developed when doing the above for typical floor of fairly uniform column grid and loading pattern. A repeated advice, while building your structural sense, please notes that company does not get immediately extra payment from the clients. Be fairly to the company.

Good Practice

Column is usually not designed for uplift. Most people at site is also not use to uplift. It is good practice to minimum uplift by:-

1. Split the beam into simply supported beams to avoid lifted.
2. Minimised uplift by putting additional span bar and opposite support link as a conservative measure.
3. When the support and span of a span is big, take care of the midspan top bar as hogging may occur.
4. For beam design based on single case of loading, need to take care of the end span link of a continuous beam and the top bar of the first interior support.
5. There are many design calculation variations, a perfect calculation is not really possible and there are numerous changes in the design and construction process. Every engineers need to learn the art of changes, Architectural requirements, Mechanical & Electrical requirement as times go along.

Tags : engineer, engineers, engineering, drawings, design, knowledge, beams, procedure, process, detailing, structural, system, architectural, building, sense

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 18th, 2007 at 10:00 am and is filed under Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.