huangyhg

engineers only push a button
hi to all,
only a question about current structural and seismic engineering practice worldwide
in my country, engineers usually design r/c structures using software that, once you've set geometry and material properties, make structural check and give you directly design drawings
in this way even an informatic engineer can design a hospital in a seismic area, just drawing members geometry, pushing "run" in a fem package, and printing drawing output, without even making sure wheather his sections are ductile or not
when he's not sure, he only adds reinforcement to feel safe
in this way most people who do not have a bs in engineering can design structures, have their design signed by a professional engineer, and submit their project, resulting this way more competitive than who spends years understanding principles and practice and tries to do things better
there're lot of people who think pushover analysis is just pushing a button
does the same happen in your country too?

i hope this doesn't happen in the usa.
what did you mean by checking if sections are ductile? doesn't the software check this?
if you add reinforcement when you're afraid your section won't be have enough resistance, you lose control of ductility
in the us, we have enough trouble with high school kids or 2 year techs designing wood trusses with computer programs and codes that they do not understand. often, their 1st submittal is incorrect or incomplete and the work must be resubmitted.
i cannot begin to imagine trying to do something like this with r/c buildings in seismic areas even if reviewed by a pe.
this, however, makes me wonder how many engineers use drafters or techs to assist them in inputting info. to large scale programs such as ram, sap or pca to design buildings. even though we have programs like these, there is still quite a few things that they won't do or that have to be modified.
what scares me is that someday a non-engineering manager will eventually make a decision to save money by using unqualified people to do design work which may possibly lead to some tragedy. hopefully, our licensing laws in the us will prevent this, but how about other countries or offshore engineering?
here in california it is the same. in fact 30% of the engineers here are from your country and another 40% are from a country with a similar design philosophy as yours, but they do not speak english as well as you.
at least that is my experience.
jike,
it is already happening. i used to work for a company that offshored engineering, and the engineering was being progressively done more by draftsmen "trained" to operate the company's "in-house" design software.
very bad trend. the licensing authority in my home state is very lax about these matters....
i believe that "canned" engineering will continue to grow and thrive until a largescale tragedy occurs.
it has been said that engineers do for $1 what any idiot can do for $2. i would question the cost effectiveness of any design done by software only, without optimization based on the experience and judgement of a professional engineer.
elastic,
what do you mean, are engineers equivalent in knowledge to an idiot? or is that a saying invented by some mba?
software can be bad or good - it all depends how much good engineering judgement, code compliance, and input checking (anti-gigo) went into the programming.
before software was used, we didn't have enough time to check everything- software can make us much better engineers by freeing us of the mundane calculator-punching.
the other edge of the sword is the "engineer-in-a-box" aspect, as this post is discussing.
i worked for a firm that like many firms utilized fea software. unfortunately, they put the burden of learning the software on the individual. even after you learn how to make the software run, you still need to know what appropriate parameters to input (think k-factor for example). several engineers (myself included) weren't sure which k-factor was appropriate and therefore chose the software default of 1. as any seasoned person knows, a k-factor of 1 is not always conservative. this is precisely why knowledgable people are required to perform software assisted engineering. merely knowing how to operate the software is not enough.
eddyc,
on the other hand, if you were doing the analysis manually, you would have used k=1 in the formula anyway, so using software did not create that problem.

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