Structural Design Made Easy

by Engineers' Compendium

Powerful modules and design aids for structural engineers

In the next few minutes you will discover tools that will forever change how you do your structural designs.

These tools bear the stamp of 40 years experience as a structural engineer. They have been developed with the support of BHP Building Products, the National Precast Concrete Association, Standards Australia, and others.

Clients Want Cost-effective Solutions

To deliver a cost-effective solution, you have to investigate many alternatives. OPT_SHED automates the task and lets you examine countless options. Have you ever thought about the permutations that are possible?

Dozens of different cladding types have different spanning capacities. Some suit the given building dimensions better than others. A dearer cladding requiring fewer supports could cost less overall.

Purlins and girts can be freely supported, continuous or lapped, with 0, 1, 2 or 3 bridging units. Frames can be spaced closely or far apart, leading to many members of small weight or few members of large weight. There is no way of guessing, you have to investigate.

The First Step Is To Get Your Loads Right

Anybody can design a cheaper structure by making it unsafe. If that's your bag then you are at the wrong place, because we are talking about designing for the correct loads, not an ounce more and not an ounce less.

You know that a structure has twenty-seven wind load zones. Each zone has six loads - three inward and three outward - for serviceability, stress design and ultimate strength. That's 162 loads, which the WINDLOAD program gives you in seconds, precisely.

What About That Constant Repetition?

If you have been a structural engineer for any length of time, you will have designed hundreds of concrete slabs. We know the answers by heart, but we go down the same course again and again.

SLAB2WAY takes the pain out of this constant repetition. No longer are you torn between two emotions - feeling negligent if you don't design yet another slab, and extravagant if you do. The program does the job instantly and comprehensively.

Much Of Our Work Has Become Too Complex

There was a time when designing reinforced concrete columns was a simple matter. No longer. The science of engineering keeps advancing, and with it does the complexity of design. To design a rectangular column with the mandatory bi-axial bending involves 320 separate assignment statements and calculations.

RECTCOL makes the task easy.

Most Of Our Time Is Taken Up By Mundane Calculations

There is a mountain of mundane calculations engineers do on a daily basis. The tasks are too varied and not heavy enough to justify a computer program. Often they are trivial tasks that do not crop up frequently. As a result, we have to do some research, dig in old text books, look up codes, and do an inordinate amount of work compared to the value of the task.

We scratch around with hand-written calculations. There is no record of the numbers punched in the calculator. Transcription errors abound. The documentation looks what it is - a scratch sheet. Compare this with MATHSERV.

... or you want to know a bit about me?

The name is Helmut Schmidhofer. From the early age of 14, I knew I was going to be a structural engineer. After completing my training and getting a good start in Graz, Austria, I came to Australia in 1955 for the opportunities this country had to offer. By 1960, at the ripe age of 29, I had my own practice.

When I retired from full-time practice in 1990, it became clear that a great deal of experience was going to waste. With the encouragement of the National Precast Concrete Association, Standards Australia, BHP Building Products (a division of BHP Steel), and many others, the software called "Engineers' Compendium" was born.

What is this "Engineers' Compendium"?

It is a dream that, somehow, the accumulated experience of our profession can be freely shared. It is a wish that the initial work offered here will act as a catalyst to bring about this dream. What have we got so far? MATHSERV, OPT_SHED, RECTCOL, SLAB2WAY, TOPDOWN, WINDLOAD, etc.

It all started with MATHSERV. One of the things you are asked to do when you are in private practice is to give "expert evidence" from time to time. Invariably, this means that you have to support your "opinions" with well-researched facts and neatly presented calculations. There is nothing more embarrassing than being caught out in cross-examination by a stupid calculation or transcription error.

So I developed MATHSERV

It was meant to be simply a calculator that works in my word processor, so that all values used in the calculations were visible and transcription errors were eliminated. KISS!

In the process of developing this program, I got carried away, and MATHSERV became an interpreter of a superset of commands of the BASIC programming language.

The rest is history

Once MATHSERV could solve any problem you want to throw at it (believe me, BASIC can, it is legendary), it was a small step to encapsulate the solutions into self-contained modules.

That is how all the other programs in "Engineers' Compendium" were created - a massive collection of BASIC statements with a bit of WINDOW dressing.

Credit where credit is due

In case the above gives you the impression that I am some kind of superman, please let me correct that impression: none of this could have happened without the tools made available by Computer Associates International, Microsoft Corporation, and Wilson WindowWare. I am forever in debt to these companies for the help they have given me.