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!

The latest edition of our quarterly company newsletter was released via email this week.  Visit the link below to check it out and subscribe to receive future updates! 

https://mailchi.mp/morabitoconsultants.com/mc_newsletter_january2022

We are proud to announce that the long overdue update to the Projects section of our website is finally complete. 

Additionally, MC continues to share our Structural Engineering Reference Guide and AIA accredited structural materials course with our colleagues in the industry. Please reach out to us at [email protected] if you would like additional information on scheduling the presentation at your firm.

Joshua Lorentson, EIT has joined MC as a design engineer.  Joshua recently graduated from the Structural and Geotechnical track of the Civil Engineering program at the University of Maryland.  He is enjoying applying his studies to real world problems and learning from the vast experience of the engineers around him.  Outside of work, Joshua can be found hanging out with family and friends, or diving into a new fantasy novel.  

We are excited to welcome Joshua to the MC team!

MC is proud to partner with PI.KL Studio and BKM in the design of the new Community Center at 5 North Calhoun Street in West Baltimore as part of the Renaissance Foundations commitment to improving the health and wellness of the area. The existing 33,000 square foot building, which was once a gelato plant, will be repurposed to house a community gathering space, commercial kitchen, and classroom spaces.  MC analyzed modifications to the existing building framing to accept new large windows, skylights, and floor openings to bring natural light into the building to revitalize the existing space. Demolition is underway and the groundbreaking ceremony can be seen here: https://www.lifebridgehealth.org/WBRF/WBRF.aspx