Structural analysis is an important part of the structural design. It could be chanllenging and time consuming. Your project may keep changing and your analysis model may need to be updated and re-run many times. Or in a fast pace design build project, you need to make quick decisions based on your analysis results. And nowadays, the design criteria is becoming more and more complicated. It is difficult for structural engineers to work on both analysis and design. You need a powerful analysis engine to support your project. Structural Express is expert on performing structural analysis. Our analysis quality has been recognized as top tier by our previous work including some of the world’s most challenging projects. By handing your structural analysis to us, you will immediately benefit from at least the following aspects:
- Reduce your project cost on the structural analysis part
- Let you stay focused on design and drafting
- Reduce your software costs
- High quality and reliable analysis results
Send us a job, we will get your analysis result ready.
World’s longest floating bridge design involves modeling of pontoons, bridges. The unique structure creates lots of challenges on the structural analysis part. Hundreds of analysis models were created during this fast pace design build projects. At the early stage of project, different models were created to verify different structural concepts.
A high profile pier/wharf project in high seismic zone. Batter pile system in transverse direction and plumb pile system in longitudinal direction designed based on start of art seismic design criteria. Each of the piles(around 500 total) was modeled with different pile length, pile spring, pile batter in two directions. Plus there are separate models for gravity, and different seismic cases. During the design period, many changes have occurred which requires the model being updated many many times. Fortunately, an automated system has been set up with our high level programming skills. Tremendous amount of analysis time have been saved.
Complicated pontoon models were built for floating bridges. Multiple types of pontoon models were built and only one type was shown below. The models were used for pontoon lifting and towing analysis. Hundreds of load cases were analyzed.
Award winning seismic retrofit for a double decker highway viaduct. The model was used for response spectra analysis, 3D pushover analysis and superstructure strength evaluation etc.
The bridge model below has many soil springs. Based on the design criteria, the soil springs have to be iterated around 10 times toward convergence. Usually it takes about ten minutes to extract a single soil spring stiffness from pile analysis program. With almost fifty springs plus 10 times iteration, the work to get spring stiffness will take a huge amount of time. We developed a in house program to extract all the spring values at a time automatically. The total spring stiffness extraction time was reduce to only half an hour instead of a week. And the in house program was reused for many other similar projects later on.
The animation below simulates a vessel impact with waterfront structures. It is an in depth 3D nonlinear impact analysis. Lots of initiative has been taken to perform the analysis. The impact load determined from the finite element analysis matches typical design values very well.
Pushover analysis of a 2D frame based on state of art displacement based design criteria. Plastic hinges were formed and investigated at pile ends.
