Structural analysis is crucial for ensuring the physical integrity of structures such as buildings, bridges, and airplanes. It involves examining the strength and weaknesses of structural components based on physical laws, mathematics, testing, and theory. Structural engineers use their expertise to analyze and design structures that can resist failure. The history of structural analysis dates back over 2,000 years, with ancient civilizations using it to build enduring structures.
Architects, builders, supervisors, users and occupants of a structure all depend on an accurate structural analysis to determine the physical integrity of a structure. The specific structure can be a house, an office building, a bridge, a tunnel, a tower, or even an airplane or ship. Structural analysis ensures that the particular structural design will withstand the stresses and forces, both internal and external, for which it was designed. Therefore, the known parameters are implemented in the examination of the safety and longevity factors of a particular structure. Additionally, structural analysis is often used to determine the cause of structural failure.
An analysis of a facility must reflect an accurate estimate of all of a facility’s foreseeable strengths and weaknesses. The analysis will determine volume limits as well as linear and surface strengths and weaknesses of structural components, including the strength of columns, walls, connectors, beams, braces and roofs. Structural analysis is largely based on immutable physical laws. A correct structural analysis most often results in the overbuilding of a structure.
In addition to the hard physical limits of the bearing capacity, tensile strength, and manufacturing properties of building materials, mathematics, testing, calculations, and theory are distinct and important aspects of structural analysis. Each design and material component of a structure is subject to its own set of physical laws. The stability of the surface on which the structure will rest, wind conditions, and the impact resistance of the various components of a structure are also examined in preparing for a structural analysis.
Structural engineers, those responsible for analyzing a structure, are highly educated and trained to decipher the intricacies of material capabilities, geometric design, and stress factors, both predicted and actual, that determine the feasibility of a particular structural design . Using education, experience and modern structural software, structural engineers, architects and builders work in concert to erect a structure that will resist failure. The structural engineer, as is his function, must often prevail over the fiscal concerns of the builder, as well as over the control of the designer’s or architect’s aesthetic fantasies.
Structural analysis has a history that dates back well over 2,000 years. The ancient Greeks and Romans used analysis of load-bearing materials, strength and stresses to build the structures of antiquity, some of which remain intact today. The Great Wall of China is another example of ancient architecture that has survived today thanks to a proper analysis of the projected integrity of the structural components. It is evident that although building materials and the aesthetics of structural design have changed dramatically over the centuries, the basic mathematical analysis of structural elements remains the same.
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