Quality Assurance of Structural Engineering Design

Abstract

Facing the escalating demands in both technical competence and financial accountability, practicing structural engineers are being forced into an ever-intensified fast-pace working environment. With more and more structural design codes becoming lengthy and cumbersome and, meanwhile, the time allocated for structural engineering design being drastically reduced, the quality assurance of the structural engineering design has been becoming more critical than ever for practicing structural engineers to succeed. Structural engineering design errors and failures have been observed in a variety of design phases and categories. Among them, there are several typical problems needed to be discussed and a systematical procedure of quality assurance of the structural engineering design shall be studied and developed. As a part of our collective professional effort to assure the quality of the structural engineering design, this paper will discuss following eight typical aspects related to quality control and assurance of structural engineering design and a number of real world practical examples will be presented to assist in illustrating the importance of the quality control and assurance for real world structural engineering design projects. 1. Structural Design Codes’ Application and Compliance Generally speaking, a competent structural engineer shall be able to deal with all kinds of structures constructed with different materials. The subject structure to be designed or analyzed may be a building, a bridge, an industrial facility, or a theme park roller coaster frame. The construction material for the structure may be metal, concrete, timber, or masonry. The first step of the design procedure for the subject structure is to determine which design code or codes shall be complied with. In order to safeguard the public health and safety, jurisdictions throughout the United States have adopted a variety of general structure design codes as minimum requirements for the design and construction of different structures. For the building structure design, the BOCA, ICBO, and SBCCI were three most adopted standard building codes in the United States in the 20 th century. However, thanks to the collective efforts of our profession, since year 2000, these three most dominate building codes have been integrated into a new comprehensive building code, the International Building Code (IBC). For the bridge structure design, in addition to their own design standards, most government transportation authorities in the United States have adopted the AASHTO Standard Specifications (ASD or LRFD) for highway bridges and AREMA for railway bridges. There are also a number of design codes and standards to regulate the structural design for certain special trades or industries such as mining, chemical engineering, etc.