Sunday, March 29, 2009

Career Day Structural Engineer.

Howdy

A student of mine asked me to give a speech to a careers class. Currently I am a teacher but over the past twenty years I have had various jobs. One of which was a structural engineer for a skylight manufacturing company. I would do simple engineering on a daily basis typically trying to get business for people in the construction industry. So my daily routine involved the receiving of faxes from a contractor who was putting together a bid for a construction job. The contractor typically was a person who did windows of any type. An architect would design a building and if it had a skylight someone else would need to build it. So I would look over the plans plug it into a computer and see what type of support would be required.

To understand what I am talking about take a look at the following web page:



On the web page are letters that represent the different types of beams that would be used to design a skylight. Typically the letter E determines the size of system used in the design of a skylight. Take a look at the next web page:

Then looking at the length of the rafter typically determined the size of rafter cross section (see the following web page).



So my day to day routine involved the engineering of skylights to get an idea of the cost of skylight system, I did have one project that was rather large. The Malcha Mall of Jerusalem Israel, is a shopping mall with a large free standing structural dome skylight which I designed. I didn't do the engineering but I calculated the lengths of every part of the skylight. Here is a photo of the project as it looks today.
To see some of today's points of interest on Google Earth use the following files:

All you need to do is have Google Earth running and click on the above links and you will be taken directly to were they are pointing you to see.

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