Structural Specialties and Niches 1

[Simba13]

Afternoon all,

Everyone says that structural engineering is generally broken up into two categories: buildings and bridges, but I'm curious about the smaller specialties within structural engineering that some of you have found yourselves in. Blast and coastal come to mind for me but I know that there are some even more specific ones out there.

 

[Simba13]

Sorry for the delay in getting back to you all. It was great seeing the variety of projects you all are working on or involved. I guess I just needed a bit of perspective, I've had some unique stuff since starting but I feel like 80% of my projects have been residential modifications for homeowners which to be honest kind of drives me crazy, mostly the constrained budgets, and the emotional nature of it, coupled with the lack of technical depth. It was good to see there is a whole other world out there without necessarily going to one of the big building firms and being a cog in a 1000+ person firm.

dhengr I'd tend to agree with your final point of specialization, rather than being able to do 100 things somewhat ok, I think it's better to be able to do 1 or 2 things very well.

 

[Ron]

As with dhengr, my career started one way and is now in the forensic realm. I started in water/wastewater tank design (steel mostly). Then went into testing construction materials and inspection of welding. Then back to design, but more broadly based with steel and aluminum...occasionally a little concrete and masonry, but not much. Most of my concrete design has been slabs and pavements, though some were reasonably complex (Amusement parks, Space Shuttle pavement, multi-axle missile carrier, interstate highway, airfield pavements, etc). Many were related to corrective designs when the items failed from the original design or lack thereof. Oddly enough, I have acquired a fair amount of geotechnical experience along the way by running a geotechnical lab for a major international geotechnical consulting firm for about 5 years and doing field geotechnical investigations.

While I have a lot of respect for the engineers who specialize and become narrowly focused experts, it was not for me. I have made a career of doing things no one else locally available wanted to do....dynamic amusement ride testing and re-design, treestand dynamic and static testing and design, concrete materials evaluations (petrography, microscopy). I think the diversity has made me a better engineer overall.

I'm a lucky guy!

 

[phamENG]

Simba - the budgets are tight on residential. It's unlikely that you'll ever get rich doing it (very few people ever "get rich" in structural engineering anyway), but don't sell it so short on the technical aspects. Truly understanding the nuances of light frame construction to the point where you can start creating really efficient and well thought out designs takes time and is very difficult.

 

[CivilSigma]

Is it wrong to not want to specialize? I guess you won't be making good money then, right?

 

[dik]

I've done just about everything listed above with the exception of bridges (only small pedestrian bridges and a snowmobile bridge over a marsh) and FRP stuff...

some of my most interesting work was done on teeth... after meeting a dentist in the student union building that was having problems with amalgam fillings on steel pins fail... when asked what the properties of the amalgam were he said it had a high compressive strength and a low tensile strength... just like concrete. The work started by my asking if it was possible that the tensile stresses created by the 'hard' point of the steel pin was creating a tensile fatigue failure in the amalgam... this was over 50 years back... since then I've done work with pietzoelectric ceramics to change turbine bearings from friction type bearings to gas bearings... this came about because of my finite element program that I wrote and my 'electric' lighter with a piezoelectric ceramic... and a bunch of stuff in between...

Also designed low pressure storage tanks... 100' dia and stacks 100' tall... done 30 storey buildings (no real tall ones) and 400,000 sq.ft cargo terminal buildings (only one that big, but a lot of smaller ones), a bunch of parkades (+20)... also a lot of masonry 18-20 storey buildings... and a bunch of shopping centres. Have played expert witness a few times, also (fires, collapses, failures and one explosion)...

I've had fun, but in hindsight I think I would have had more fun in medicine...

Rather than think climate change and the corona virus as science, think of it as the wrath of God. Feel any better?
-Dik

 

[Simba13]

phamENG I know you're right, I am happy to get into the NDS since timber seems to be something a lot of engineers don't get a lot of experience with. But it's tough because it seems simple enough that at least in my market, you end up with architects doing things they shouldn't be doing (i have something structural from an architect in my inbox that he "designed" that he wants my opinion on, seriously wth), I suspect this kind of thing wouldn't happen on a post-tensioned concrete job, too complex to fake it.

For me the difficulty in wood seems more on the details of framing and how loads are actually transferred than member design, exactly as jayrod12 mentioned earlier. And it's not so much about getting rich (I'm a salaried employee so it doesn't really matter at this point) it's more about dealing with clients who understand that some of this stuff can be complicated and that it takes time (which = money).

Anyway, that's my whining, didn't mean for this to end up as some negative reddit post. I'm actually pretty happy where I'm at but as they say variety is the spice of life and I wanted to get a better idea of some cool niches.

P.S. dik that teeth thing sounds crazy interesting and 30 stories is pretty tall by most standards.

 

[dik]

Teeth... my first encounter with LVTDs for measuring deformations... and statistical sums... measurements were in the order of 10 to 25 microns and with the data scatter, the only way to determine families was statistically... I wasn't even registered back then... a year or so before I became registered.

Rather than think climate change and the corona virus as science, think of it as the wrath of God. Feel any better?
-Dik