MC would like to wish our staff and colleagues a Happy International Women’s Day!
We would like to take a second to recognize Ruth Gordon Schnapp, who is well known as the first woman, structural engineer. In 1950, she graduated from Stanford University with a degree in structural engineering and in 1959 became the first woman to receive a structural engineering license in the state of California. Ruth is just one of the many women that have helped pave the way for women to be accepted in engineering and we encourage everyone, in all fields, to join in on the commitment to #BreakTheBias
MC had the privilege of teaming up with Whiting Turner, Becker Morgan Group, and Gipe Associates on the addition to Stephen Decatur Middle School in Worcester County, MD. The 25,000 SF addition will house 12 new classrooms, four new science labs, along with meeting and storage areas. This new wing will replace the nine portable trailers that are currently in use and is expected to be completed by the end of this year. Check out this article by Ocean City Today to learn more about this month’s construction updates on this project.
MC would like to wish our staff and colleagues a Happy Engineers Week!
Earlier this month, we had the privilege to be a sponsor for the Baltimore Museum of Industry (BMI) 2022 Wood Bridge Challenge. Local high school students competed to build the most “efficient” basswood and glue bridge to span a one-foot gap. The most efficient bridge is one that carries the most load, relative to its own weight (Load / Bridge Weight). The winning bridge weighed 3.2 Pounds and supported 110 pounds at failure! Our local schools have some excellent engineers in the making.
If you know of any aspiring engineers, BMI has other engineering challenges coming up for students in grades 1-12 which you can find on their website. Help us build the future of engineering today!
The BMI competition is just one local event of many across the country, and information on the rules and event history can be found here. Check out this video if you’re interested in watching the event.
Morabito Consultants had the pleasure of working alongside Becker Morgan Group on what started as a feasibility study and turned into the new Showell Elementary School located in Berlin, MD. The replacement school opened its doors to students in 2021 featuring rooms for art and music, a media center, gymnasium, and spaces for special education, reading, math, and technology education. This project is LEED Silver Certified and was also awarded an AIA Chesapeake Bay Award and a Sustainable Design Award. Check out this article from Coastal Style for more information on this project that focused on sustainability.
Learning By Design
Morabito Consultants is proud to be working with UniFIED Efforts in the development of their new youth center located in the Penn North neighborhood of downtown Baltimore. UniFIED Efforts is a nonprofit organization with a commitment to reducing summer learning loss by providing various programs year-round for children at no cost to parents. Here you can see a video of Tony Morabito and some of future students taking measurements of the existing building. MC takes great pride in working alongside these students and we are excited to be involved in creating this safe space for the Baltimore community. Hopefully we can inspire a few future engineers along the way!
Morabito Consultants has been fortunate to be an integral part of the design team selected by Brightview Senior Living for many of their Independent and Assisted Living Facilities throughout the east coast. To date, we have been the Structural Engineer of Record on more than 10 different communities! The communities are often comprised of wood framed Independent Living wings and light gauge and composite joist framed Assisted Living and Memory Care wings.
Some recently completed communities include Brightview Columbia, Brightview Grosvenor, and Brightview Fair Oaks. During the recent overhaul of our website, we added great new photos of these communities! (Brightview Senior Living)
MC’s partnership with Brightview Senior Living remains strong to this day as we are currently in the design phase for three (3) more communities! It continues to be a pleasure to work with them and the phenomenal design teams on these stunning and impactful projects.
In the third and final part of our ‘Back to Basics’ series, we will be discussing the final basic component of physics used to analyze a structure: Compatibility.
Compatibility involves the understanding of how engineers know or assume a structure will likely move or deform. An application of compatibility could involve the understanding of how composite materials behave. Reinforced concrete is a composite material in numerous ways, but typically thought of as being a composite between the rebar and solid cement and rock mass. When an engineer needs to determine how much force finds its way to a particular piece of rebar, compatibility is needed. We know that contact surface between the rebar and concrete must strain (move) at the same time or else it means that the rebar has detached from its bond. This mechanism is referred to as Strain Compatibility and it helps engineers determine the distribution of stresses/forces throughout reinforced concrete.
No matter how complicated a structure may be, as long as Constitutive Properties, Equilibrium, and Compatibility are reasonably satisfied, the engineering solution is typically considered to be valid.
In Part 2 of our ‘Back to Basics’ series, we will be discussing the second basic component of physics used to analyze a structure: Equilibrium.
In structural engineering, equilibrium is typically well defined in terms of specific equations, however, the third law of Newton’s physics is sufficient to explain the goal of most building structural engineering problems. “For every action (force) in nature there is an equal and opposite reaction.” Structural engineers need to find solutions to problems (forces) so there will always be a constant opposite reaction to keep a structure at-rest. This is known as static equilibrium. Engineers are always questioning the reliability of a structure’s support to act in a permanently static condition with regards to the overall stability of the structure and the user tolerance to perceived movement.
We will be discussing the third and final component, Compatibility, later this week.
When mathematical problems in structural engineering become more complex or have a great deal of uncertainty in variables, it is important for engineers to go back to fundamental principles when considering potential solutions. Many problems that engineers encounter do not have pre-determined equations or step-by-step procedures for following in references or codes. At these times, it requires invoking our earliest training in mechanics of materials and other theoretical fundamentals. In order to analyze a structure, there are essentially three basic components of physics that need to be satisfied. In no particular order of importance, they are 1) Constitutive Properties 2) Equilibrium and 3) Compatibility. In today’s post we will cover Constitutive Properties.
Constitutive Properties involve utilizing the appropriate model (graph) for a given material’s relationship between stress (pressure) and strain (molecule movement within a mass). Some materials have constitutive properties such that there is a well-defined linear model that relates stress and strain; other materials such as hyper elastic and viscoelastic materials have very non-linear “curvy” stress-strain graphs. Some materials constitutive properties are highly sensitive to thermodynamics and change over the range of a few degrees in temperature. Using a poor constitutive model may result in the unconservative prediction of structural movement or non-brittle failure. It is important that materials used in structural design have had sufficient testing to have well-defined constitutive properties for engineers to assure their behavior can be adequately predicted.
We will be covering Equilibrium and Compatibility next week. Stay tuned!
