ASCE 7-10 3

[vandede427]

Got the new 2010 in the mail today. That sucker doubled in size from the '05 version.

What's happening here people?

There's a 1961 version of ACI 318 on my company bookshelf that's only 30 pages.

 

[weab]

Jed/Sundale, I hear you.

Perhaps I'm on my own island, but my company works on oil production facilities and mining and other industries. These are things that mean $1,000,000 a day to the owners. Throwing a little more steel at a problem QUICKLY outweighs the need to save 5% steel weight. Opening facilities a week earlier is much preferred.

I'm OK with complicated and precise codes if only there were quick and conservative alternatives. The madness has got to stop.

 

[LSPSCAT]

We need to seriously start a movement towards simplification. I am finishing up graduate studies now and it is only getting worse from the academics perspective. Few if any Professors seem to have any practical experiences, if you even ask a question that has practical meaning you are wisked away to the land of wind tunnels and academic papers. This is not good, as most younger students cannot find jobs and are going to straight to grad school it may become worse as now they have an additional 2 years of indoctrination. (Disclaimer - I come from the land of ME's so my initial education lacked much of the strict adherance to various codes.)

In practice, I agree with jsdpe25684, time is now more important than ever. We need clear and concise methods to arrive at solutions so we can spend time actually framing the problem and developing a proper solution. A well devised scheme will save more money in construction and material than any computation with 3 significant figures.

Computers, if anything, can tend to slow us down as we believe we can perform a more rigorous analysis than justified. Obviously computers have use, however, in terms of the codes they offer us little benefit. We now have the ability to quickly analyze 5 limit states and 20 load cases, however, how many engineers can really comprehend such a matrix of results?

 

[wmta]

This whole revisions is terrible. I have never read any document that is so poorly written and unclear. Hundreds of pages of data in a code does not help anyone.
All it seems to be doing is making the analysis of structure more complicated.

 

[dhengr]

I feel your pain! My thoughts posted in the thread #507-272042 “ASD Steel Construction Manual,” by Jambruins, 13MAY10, apply here too.

Between the bunch of us, if we bought only a few copies and critiqued them right here we would discover that they really offer nothing new or better, just a complicated new reformulation. Then talk to your legislators, and building officials, at the state, county and city levels, wherever the adoption decision is made. Their stock in trade is nit-picking on minor code details, and yet, the ones that I have talked to are almost as overwhelmed and frustrated as we are. They can’t keep up with it either, and still get any work done. If we explained our position, and reasoning, to them, they might decide the new edition isn’t worth adoption, in which case we wouldn’t need to buy it. We do probably have to show them that the new version offers no improvements in safety or economy, because that is not normally what they do, without some guidance from practitioners.

For starters, we should just quit buying every damn new edition of all of the codes and all of the new computer programs. We pay a premium for all that crap and all of the new bells and whistles really don’t improve our lives or give us better answers, results or designs or really make any of us better engineers. This just keeps enriching the producers of this more and more complicated crap, in effect encouraging them to continue. And each time, we have to stop production and relearn to use this new fangled system or code.

 

[rowingengineer]

This is an opinion from afar, but the Aust wind code is more advanced than the American. From the news I would say in hurricane area's this is important. I am yet so see a city pass the hurricane test without damage to new buildings.

An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field

 

[jropert]

I was fortunate enough to attend an IBC seminar in which SK Ghosh spoke about the new changes to the 2010 IBC. What a mess! Here in Hawaii, only Oahu is on 03 IBC, and some of the other islands are on as old as 1991 UBC!!!...That's all going to change in about a year to 06 IBC for the state. Then on our way up the IBC chain.

Im getting very frustrated at the concrete anchorage that we have to design for! It seems like every successive code allows less and less load for anchors in concrete! And you think engineers are not exactly the favorite around jobsites now!

And to follow up with vandede427, we actually are becoming more and more like lawyers, as we spend about 90% of our time reading code to make sure we cover our tails, 5% in acutal design, and the last 5% on these forums making sure we did the 95% of our job right!..haha...The only thing separating us from calling ourselves lawyers is the fact that we have an ethical responsibility to keep in mind while designing (just kidding..sort of).