Greetings...
A colleague asked me to research a question posed by one of his clients while he is on vacation this week. Both of us are civil engineers with lots of experience (me, 41 years; my colleague, 28 years), but our combined experience with pressure vessels is limited to sizing and...
https://www.yourcentralvalley.com/news/local-news/surveillance-camera-captures-deadly-water-tank-explosion-in-lemoore/
This happened in my area. I am very familiar with Lemoore and its water system because twice I was at firms that served as the contract City Engineer and I have designed some...
Greetings...
I was brought in late to a project to perform QA/QC reviews. The centerpiece of the project is a new oil-water separator (OWS) at an airfield. As part of this work, the project engineer built a model of the storm drainage system upstream of the proposed OWS using Autodesk Storm...
We have a project in San Diego County, California, that includes about 800 ft of 11 ft x 4 ft (inside) precast concrete box for a storm drain. Except for a little bit at each end, the entire alignment is in a residential street (the ends are "in dirt"). Cover ranges from about 18 inches to 6...
The news app on my phone just beeped with a notice that I.M. Pei died.
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"Is it the only lesson of history that mankind is unteachable?"
--Winston S. Churchill
I am working on a drainage study for a solar array. The tracking solar panels will be individually mounted on driven wide flange piles (W6x15 IIRC). The County and the structural engineer want an estimate of the scour depth around the piles. All of the information I have been able to find...
After a LONG wait, Mathcad 3.0 Prime is now available from PTC: http://www.ptc.com/
Since I am still running Mathcad 8 (vintage 1994) and it isn't completely happy on a Windows 7 machine, I decided to bite the $1550 bullet and upgrade. I didn't think Prime 1.0 and 2.0 were quite ready for...
As best I can tell, ASTM F 1554 and ACI 318 Appendix D don't make a strength distinctions between headed anchors and the "equivalent" threaded rods. However, I have read several places online that threaded rods are 10-15% weaker than headed bolts, which makes perfect sense to me given the...
I'm working on a secondary containment pit for some chemical storage tanks. Originally the pit was going to be 32'x30'x5' deep and I was going to do the floor slab as one piece. However, the tank diameters have grown and now I am looking at a slab that is 49'x45'. Site soils are good (k=200...
I would like some guidance on this topic because it's been about 20 years since I last did this. As part of an industrial site project, I am designing two outdoor traffic-rated slabs. The bigger one (about 20'x60') must support a large, rubber tired fork lift weighing about 13 tons plus loads up...
PTC recently announced a free version of Mathcad Prime 2.0 called Mathcad Express, which apparently hasn't been discussed here. As best I can tell, Express has only been available for a few weeks. It's a stripped down verson of Prime that has only about half the number of mathematical...
Yes, I'm still using Mathcad 8. I got started with the last DOS version and upgraded my personal and work copies each time through v8. Then the upgrade price increased to a level I couldn't justify because v8 did and still does most of what I need (primarily algebra, trig, keeping track of...
I'm a civil engineer, and was playing around with Excel this afternoon when I had a wild hare to come up with a more clever way to calculate the azimuth of a line than I had been using.
Trig by itself won't do it. Angle=ATAN(DeltaE/DeltaN) is the starting point, but it results in dividing by...
Greetings from Central CA:
I just received a mailing from Mathsoft offering to upgrade my Mathcad 8 (yes, I know: stoneage) to Mathcad 13 plus a tool to work with Excel for a package price of under $300. Mcad 8 does most of what I need, but several features have been added over the years that I...
