Structural design process

Finally, failure analysis is the process of comparing actual performance with the desired performance. Thus, failure analysis is a nontrivial part of the structural design process. Facets of failure analysis including what failure means for a structure are addressed in Section 7.6 on Design Requirements and Design Failure Criteria. 

We have examined one view of structural design, and we will focus our attention later on in Section 7.4 how to reconfigure a composite structure as opposed to a metal structure. That reconfiguration process will be our principal interest. In this section, we simply address the basic structural design process irrespective of the materials used. 

The term design-analysis is used to emphasize the essential, but not dominant, role of analysis in the overall structural design process. Analysis plays no role whatsoever in dress design (with the possible exception of the now-classical analysis of a strapless evening gown). However, engineering design of a structure must involve analysis in the form of mechanistic relationships. Those mechanistic relationships must be used to quantitatively determine how to create the structural capabilities and then to match them to the structural requirements. The dis-... 

Recall from discussion of the structural design process in Section 7.2 that reconfiguration of the structure is an essential step. Reconfiguration occurs either to increase the capability or to decrease the weight because the structure has more than adequate capability. The term ca-pabi/ity s meant to include margin of safety relative to fracture, adequate resistance to buckling, sufficient difference of excitation frequency from resonant frequencies, etc. 

Failure has many meanings or interpretations in the context of the structural design process. The main meaning is that failure is the inability of the structure to perform up to its design requirements. Those requirements can be expressed simplistically in terms of the following functional ways ... 

Although holistic design provides a means to understand problems and their causes from both deeper and broader perspectives and to facilitate more reliable, robust, and resilient solutions, it is often not adopted because of barriers that are both structural—design processes are not generally set up to address solutions that encompass larger systems, and perceptual—the benefits and return on investment are not appreciated (Rohrer 2011). 

MacGregor, J. G. The Structural Design Process, Introductory Report of the Twelfth Congress of the International Association for Bridge and Structural Engineering Vancouver, September 1984,... 

The initial stage of the structural design process consists of the so-called conceptual design, in which the different structural elements that are needed to support the structure are selected and are geometrically defined, taking into account the architectural requirements. In parallel, aU restrictions imposed by the building s use, as well as its location and associated environmental actions have to be satisfied. 

Seismic Analysis of Steel Buildings Numerical Modeling, Fig. 39 Flowchart of structural design process for steel buildings... 

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