Edit post

Edit your reply below.

Post Body
Enter your post below.
[quote user="BaltACD"]As an outsider, what I see of Engineering in the late 20th and early 21st Centuries has been the aim to minimize costs of a project as opposed to insuring the safety of a project. [/quote] You are right, it isall about cost. We know more about material properties so we can allow higher stresses. There are new materials e.g high performance concrete which is much less fault-tolerant than standard concrete. I'm not sure if the next is true for the USA too. The nominal safety factor has been the same in Germany over all the years. But in reality it always has been higher. This margin has been reduced to almost zero with better analysis methods (software) and using the better knowledge of material properties. Here Germany the safety factor is between 1.75 and 2.1 depending on mode of failure. There are very few failures here. We have something here called two-person integrity. We analyze and design and an indipendent engineer checks or work and only with his approval we can go forward. It adds about 1% to the costs. Regards, Volker
Tags (Optional)
Tags are keywords that get attached to your post. They are used to categorize your submission and make it easier to search for. To add tags to your post type a tag into the box below and click the "Add Tag" button.
Add Tag