Bridge engineering - manual calculation tools

[lionii]

Hi,

First of all, I am overwhelmed by the quantity and quality of the threads and replies in the forum and glad to become a part of it. I started this thread to have some information for what kind of manual calculation tools are needed for general bridge engineering (or design). I apologized if there are similar questions but I cannot locate it.

I was doing building structural engineering and recently moved to a bridge engineering field. Since there is a three-year gap between two roles, I am struggling to recover my old memories about structural engineering. At the same time, I am planning to set up my own toolbox such as spreadsheets, VBA and MathCad files to assist my bridge engineering career. But I have little idea what kind of calculations are good to be set up for my own-use.

I first asked whether there are some in-house tools in the company I am working for but there aren’t any official ones. People seem to use their own tool and reluctant to share it. So far I have seen only one type of spreadsheet assisting steel girder bridge design.

I am currently working on concrete box girder bridge preliminary design and heavily rely on commercial software – Bentley LEAP bridge (not fully understand where the numbers coming from). I would like to able to verify this manually and possibly for other types of bridge design and substructure designs.

The question may not be clear enough. English is my second language and I am still very new to this field of engineering so don’t know what I don’t know.

I appreciate all the comments!

 

[Qshake]

Bentely LEAP has documented examples or tutorials, so I would recommend those to help you understand the numbers.

As to your coworkers not wanting to share their spreadsheets that just sounds crazy to me...they won't even tell you what spreadsheets they have?!

Many years ago I went through the ropes doing hand calcs and finding which tasks were better suited for spreadsheets and later MathCAD. I suggest you do the same as it will really help to know where those numbers come from.

Regards,
Qshake

Eng-Tips Forums:Real Solutions for Real Problems Really Quick.

 

[Iako]

I worked as Bridge engineer. For software i used SAP2000NL, i believe its the best for parametric analysis. Furthermore for calculating the modal identifacations, specially for filtering and processing mathlab was always our basic tool.

For manual calculations:
First of all in the bridges there are two kinds of control. The catastrophic and non catastrophic methods.

For non-catastrophic methods:
Visual Inspection, condition evaluation, sufficiency rating
Ambient Vibration Monitoring using moveamble accelemeter array (processing and filtering using mathlab)
Analytic Bridge Modelling using for example SAP2000NL

these non-catastrophic are the cheapest methods

 

[lionii]

Thanks for the comments!

 

[TLHS]

The not sharing thing may not be malicious. I'm not willing to hand my personal library over to people because they don't necessarily understand the way the calc sheet was built and the implications of it. If someone comes to me with a specific question, or I see them working on something and I have a good calc sheet I'll give it to them, but I'll also sit down and explain it and tell them what references to check before using it.

If it's something that myself or someone else has developed as a standard and it's fully tested and documented it's a different story.