a:26:{s:9:"weblog_id";s:1:"2";s:8:"entry_id";s:0:"";s:6:"sticky";s:0:"";s:14:"allow_comments";s:1:"n";s:16:"allow_trackbacks";s:1:"n";s:10:"entry_date";s:19:"2010-02-17 06:42 AM";s:15:"expiration_date";s:0:"";s:23:"comment_expiration_date";s:0:"";s:9:"author_id";s:1:"4";s:6:"status";s:4:"open";s:14:"trackback_urls";s:0:"";s:18:"versioning_enabled";s:1:"y";s:5:"title";s:48:"\"If We Make A Mistake, It Could Be Disastrous\"";s:9:"url_title";s:43:"if_we_make_a_mistake_it_could_be_disastrous";s:6:"submit";s:6:"Submit";s:10:"field_id_5";s:48:"\"If We Make a Mistake, It Could Be Disastrous\"";s:10:"field_ft_5";s:4:"none";s:10:"field_id_9";s:118:" Structural engineering is considered a part of civil engineering, but there is a movement afoot to separate the two. ";s:10:"field_ft_9";s:4:"none";s:11:"field_id_13";s:0:"";s:10:"field_id_7";s:23:"Structural, Engineering";s:10:"field_ft_7";s:4:"none";s:10:"field_id_8";s:9671:"<p>\"If We Make A Mistake, It Could Be Disastrous\"</p>
<p>Structural engineering is considered a part of civil engineering, but there is a movement afoot to separate the two. In typical construction practice, the structural engineer and the civil engineer are different and some structural engineers advocate separate licensing as well.</p>
<p>\"Our job is to make sure a building stands up long enough for people to get out safely\" in the event of a  catastrophe such as an earthquake that causes the building to collapse, said Douglas Antholz, an associate at KPFF Consulting Engineers and president of SEAKM (Structural Engineers Association of Kansas and Missouri).</p>
<p><img alt=\"Bridge Collapse\" class=\"image-left\" height=\"303\" src=\"/images/uploads/bridge.jpg\" style=\"float: left;\" width=\"266\" />\"We have a huge impact on safety and we think we should be treated differently from other engineers,\" he said. Antholz and SEAKM want Missouri to join Illinois and 11 other states with separate licenses for the practice of structural engineering.</p>
<p>According to the Structural Engineering Institute, the required course of study for a bachelor of science degree in engineering has been reduced at most universities over the years from 150 credit hours to 124 - meaning that many graduates have not had all the courses needed to design with the various structural materials used in modern structures - while structural design and building codes have become more complicated.</p>
<p>In Missouri, someone who passes a general civil engineering test that has little structural content can still practice structural engineering, \"although ethically they should not,\" Antholz said.  Or one could take a multiple choice structural engineering exam. SEAKM would like to see structural engineers required to pass a structural engineering test in which they have to work out problems and show their work - analogous to the way Missouri has replaced multiple choice tests for grade school students with \"constructed response\" tests in which students have to show their work to show that they can read, write, and do arithmetic.</p>
<p>\"We do need to know more,\" said Richard Bulczak, senior structural engineer at Heideman Associates. \"Structural codes have gotten thicker, there is more information we need to know and more we need to check,\" he said.</p>
<p>\"Our designs are location specific based on the soil conditions at each specific site. And we have to look at different materials both because at different locations different materials are readily available and because we offer developers options - different solutions based on what is most constructable, what is the cheapest, and what is the fastest to build,\" he said.</p>
<p>Ingenious One</p>
<p>The first documented engineer was a structural engineer, Imhotep, who built a famous stepped pyramid in Saqqarah, Egypt, for Pharaoh Netjerikhet (or Djoser) around 2600 BC. He is considered the inventor of building with shaped stones. Imhotep wanted to building something that would last for ages and after 4600 years his monument to Netjerikhet still stands and is regarded as the world\'s oldest known stone structure.</p>
<p>It was admiration for such impressive structures that gave birth to the term \"engineer\" - literally \"ingenious one\" - in the eleventh century.</p>
<p>Today, \"the structural engineer\'s role is to take the architect\'s concept and put numbers to how the building holds up. We\'re concerned with how the building gets used and where it is located. An office is different from a school, an industrial building is different from a highrise residential building. Each one is subject to different loadings due to the use that is put on it,\" Antholz said. When structural engineers talk about location it is shorthand for the environmental loads that will be put on a structur from snow, earthquakes, and wind.</p>
<p>Structurally ingenious local projects include the Roberts Tower, Brauer Hall, and the Chaifetz Arena. The Roberts Tower downtown is a 20-story structure that, \"because it is skinnier than one would like, uses a higher stress concrete for strength,\" Antholz said. Brauer Hall at Wash University long spans and heavy interior loads that normally would call for a steel structure, but because it is a laboratory building with equipment and experiments that are sensitive to vibration, it was built using concrete instead. The Chaifetz Arena \"has an all exposed structure with large spans, and the structure has to be stronger because you\'re hanging things from it normally you wouldn\'t do that,\" Antholz said.</p>
<p>A big boost to ingenuity, he said, came from computer modeling. \"When Barnes Tower was built in the 1960s, all the math was done by hand. Now you throw it all into a computer and you actually design a building several times as the architect makes changes,\" Antholz said. \"It is very advantageous for the owner,\" Bulczak added. \"It gives us the opportunity to give clients several alternatives and to be less conservative in the design,\" he explained.</p>
<p>Owners and developers, however, often seem blind to - or uninterested in - the role of ingenuity. \"They treat us like a commodity,\" Antholz said. \"The structural engineer can have a huge affect on the cost of constructing a building based on his design, but owners don\'t see what we contribute, so they are fee shopping and changing firms,\" he said. Fee shopping is looking for the lowest first price without regard for quality or ultimate cost. \"The discounting is brutal,\" Antholz added. \"There was one job we bid where the owner wanted us to discount our fee 50 percent,\" he said.</p>
<p>Patenting Methods</p>
<p>One response to fee shopping is patenting. FDH Engineering Inc., a structural, geotechnical, and civil engineering firm based in Raleigh, NC with offices in St. Louis and Baton Rouge, received a patent in 2009 for a method for mapping concrete foundations. When the company was formed as an engineering consulting firm in 2000, \"we started out doing nondestructive testing of foundations, which led to structural engineering to re-engineer structures,\" said Vice President Christopher Murphy. One of the company\'s founders, J. Darrin Holt, developed methods for using radar and digital signal processing to assess the depth and strength of buried concrete foundations for a variety of structures, including telecommunication towers and bridges. In 2009, FDH patented their investigative method.</p>
<p>\"Our investigative process, our flow charts, the way we present our results, all of it is patented,\" Murphy said, adding that \"under the doctrine of equivalence, any process or technology that produces a report with the same information that we produce is covered by our patent.\"</p>
<p>\"You can\'t patent a result,\" said John Roedel, partner at Senniger Powers LLP and a prominent patent attorney. \"You can only  patent a machine, a process, an article of commerce, or a composition of matter.\" A company can patent the process it uses to get a result, although the patent might not hold up if competitors can show the process was in public use at least a year before the application was made for a patent, but it can\'t patent the result. And, although there is such a thing as the doctrine of equivalence, there is also an \"all elements rule,\" Roedel said, \"which means an accused process has to contain each element of a patent or the patent can\'t apply.\"</p>
<p>The U.S, Sureme Court might or might not change all that, Roedel said. The patent world, he said, is anxiously awaiting the U.S. Supreme Court\'s decision in a case known as Bilski v. Kappos, on which the Court heard oral arguments last November on an appeal of a Federal Circuit Court decision that patents cannot be granted on methods for handling information. The circuit court had ruled that to be eligible for a patent, a method had to be tied either to a machine or to the transformation of a particular thing into a different state or thing. Roedel noted that a decision in that case could directly affect the validity of FDH Engineering\'s patent.</p>
<p>Although Murphy\'s claims for the patent granted to FDH Engineering may be overly broad, the real utility of the patent is not to stop competitors from doing work, he said, but to promote FDH Engineering. \"It legitimizes the company. It says that we are the experts,\" he said.</p>
<p>Deacon Farrelly, manager of business development in FDH Engineering\'s St. Louis office, said the patent \"mostly helps us get contracts with departments of transportation.\" He said the patent helped FDH recently get a contract to inspect 1,000 bridges over four years in Louisiana. In Kansas, he said, the state department of transportation had already awarded contracts to four firms for upgrading or repairing 17,000 bridges when FDH Engineering got its patent. After showing the patent to the state transportation department, \"they sent a letter out to all four firms telling them to use us whenever they had to investigate unknown foundations,\" he said.</p>
<p>Even though it is one response to commoditization, Antholz is not a fan of patenting. \"Many people see patents of methods as harmful to the community because, if someone has truly come up with a better mouse-trap, the patent in essence limits it use.\" In practical terms, he said, \"you can usually work around the issue by using a different method.\"</p>
<p>FDH Engineering, however, is sold on the practice. \"We have an application pending for a patent on a method for finding rebar in dams,\" Murphy said.</p>
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