Standards
Practical applications
Punching Shear in Spread Footings to CSA A23.3
Size a spread footing for punching shear to CSA A23.3-24: the size effect factor, the 2d footing exemption, the depth quadratic and a one-way check.
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Design principles
Practical applications
Standards
Why Concrete Takes 5 Years to Cure: Understanding Creep and Its Impact on Deflection
Why concrete creep can triple long-term deflections and what that means for high-rise schedules, form stripping and serviceability.
Managing Errors in Reinforced Concrete Design: A Philosophy for Engineers
Why managing errors is the mark of skilled RC design in Canada. Understand CSA A23.3 safety factors, phi values, and construction tolerances.
Converting Geotechnical P-Y Curves Into Structural Spring Models
Transform nonlinear P-Y curves from geotechnical reports into usable spring stiffness values for your structural analysis using secant and piecewise methods.
Effective Moment of Inertia for Cracked Concrete Walls
Why Ie/Ig ratios for concrete walls range from 0.25 to 0.8 across codes, and how to pick the right stiffness reduction factor for seismic analysis.
Substitute Frame Method
Learn how to reduce multi-bay moment frames to simple stick models for rapid period estimation and drift checks during preliminary seismic design.
Understanding Shear Area
Shear area is the effective area behind shear stiffness. Get the formulas for rectangles and I-shapes, a worked example, and when zero is safe to enter.
About Me
I’m a structural engineer at Associated Engineering in Vancouver. The work is civic infrastructure: water and wastewater structures, seismic design, and the analysis and drawings that go with them, on projects across Canada and the U.S.
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