colincaprani.com

I was delighted to see that the West Point Bridge Designer program has been updated and the competition is still being run. It really makes bridge design fun! The main website is here: West Point Bridge Design Contest (342 hits).

The program is the main point of interst though. For your design, it animates in real time the stresses and member failures that occur as chosen loads traverse your bridge. The graphics are cool and there isn’t too much by way of technical input data required. Prepare to lose some hours playing this though!

West Point Bridge Designer 2010

A funny bridge design is here:

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In a revival of a department tradition, this year’s final year students organised a class trip to see some world class structures in Munich, Germany. In a futile attempt to prove that we’re still young, three intrepid lecturers accompanied the class, of which I was one. Since I’m writing this, you know the ending: we survived! In an incredible show of restraint, the students resisted the urge to bury us in snow (it was -6 to -9 C), or otherwise leave us in Munich. Thanks!

Joking aside though, we visited three incredible structures/displays. The first was BMW Welt (83 hits), which is a hugely architecture-driven structure with an amazing floating walkway through the space. BMW Welt is worth the visit just for the displays of automotive technology. Even though we’re not mechanical engineers, I think the basic engineering of complex systems still appealed to us.

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BMW Welt

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Some of us knew it already, but now there’s proof!

Produced by Arup (66 hits) for the Hong Kong Institution (66 hits) of Engineers 2009 Presidential Address.

In a good start to the new year, the paper The use of predictive likelihood to estimate the distribution of extreme bridge traffic load effect has been published in Structural Safety. It was first submitted in December 2007 so it’s great that it has been given page numbers at last! It has been published in Vol. 32(2) March 2010 issue of Structural Safety, pages 138-144.

Even though it’s been a long wait, Structural Safety is a well-reputed journal with an impact factor of 1.47 (2009) which is very high for a civil-engineering journal. The paper is available here, but may require a purchase if you don’t have an institutional login:

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.strusafe.2009.09.001 (366 hits)

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Abstract
To assess the safety of an existing bridge, the loads to which it may be subject in its lifetime are required. Statistical analysis is used to extrapolate a sample of load effect values from the simulation period to the required design period. Complex statistical methods are often used and the end result is usually a single value of characteristic load effect. Such a deterministic result is at odds with the underlying stochastic nature of the problem. In this paper, predictive likelihood is shown to be a method by which the distribution of the lifetime extreme load effect may be determined. An estimate of the distribution of lifetime maximum load effect facilitates the reliability approach to bridge assessment. Results are presented for some cases of bridge loading, compared to a return period approach and significant differences identified. The implications for the assessment of existing bridges are discussed.

The full reference is:

Caprani, C.C., OBrien, E.J. (2010), ‘The Use of Predictive Likelihood to Estimate the Distribution of Extreme Bridge Traffic Load Effect’, Structural Safety, Vol. 32(2), March, pp. 138-144. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.strusafe.2009.09.001 (366 hits).