Hey Reader When designing a building, it's easy to focus on gravity loads. Roof loads go to beams, beams transfer loads to columns, and columns transfer them to the foundations. But what happens when the wind pushes against the side of a building? How does the building resist those horizontal forces? That's where lateral stability comes in. Think about these two tables: Both tables can resist horizontal forces, but they do it differently. The table on the left relies on a single central...
16 days ago • 1 min read
Hey Reader Imagine opening a new structural engineering project and having half your preliminary design already worked out. And I’m not talking about any crazy AI automation That's what you can achieve by building a library of design aids. And it’s not just about saving time. In 1990, Mark Stewart at the University of Newcastle simulated engineers designing steel members. Using safe load tables meant fewer members came out the wrong size, and design time dropped by around 65%. So how do you...
19 days ago • 1 min read
Hey Reader In my last YT video, I showed you how a mono stringer steel stair can fail if you don’t design it properly. Torsion isn't something we deal with every day in structural engineering, particularly in buildings. In fact, we often try to design structures to avoid torsion rather than having to deal with it. Because why not? But every now and then, we come across situations where torsion is unavoidable. Whenever a load is applied eccentrically to a structural member, causing it to...
26 days ago • 1 min read
Hi Reader A new mezzanine I was designing has about 54 kN coming down one of the new steel columns onto an existing warehouse slab. The easy solution would be to cut the slab and add a new footing. But before creating all that extra work, I wanted to see if the existing slab could do the job. I started by working backwards from the column reaction. Assuming 100 kPa allowable bearing pressure: Required area = 0.31 m² ≈ 560 × 560 mm Then the question becomes whether the existing slab can spread...
3 months ago • 1 min read
Hey Reader, Early in my career, I told my boss a job would take two days. It took five. The worst part wasn’t being wrong. It was that when he asked what happened, I had nothing. I couldn’t tell him whether I had been slow, whether I had spent half a day learning something new, whether I had missed something and redone the work, or whether the drawings had changed. It all just felt like “design time.” Something nobody explained to me until much later was that when your boss asks how long a...
3 months ago • 2 min read
Hi everyone, I’ve had a few people tell me they find roof truss layouts difficult to understand, so I’ve uploaded a short section from one of our recent live calls inside BengLab In this part of the session, I talked through roof trusses and showed a 3D model. You can watch the walkthrough here This is the kind of practical engineering thinking we go through inside BengLab. Not just formulas, but how to look at a real structure and understand what is actually happening. Also, today is the...
4 months ago • 1 min read
Hi everyone, When I first started designing structures, I’d open a house plan and immediately look for something I could calculate. A beam. A lintel. A column. It felt productive. It was usually premature. Because before you size any individual member, you have to understand how the structure works as a whole. A one-storey timber-framed house on columns looks simple from the outside. But there are a lot of decisions hidden behind that simple appearance. Looking at this house, the first...
5 months ago • 2 min read
The best structural design is usually the boring one. Simple. Repeated. Easy to build. I don’t mean lazy design. I mean you are thinking about the whole project, not just trying to make every member as small as possible. Here are a few examples: Line things up where you can Sometimes the best move is to talk to the architect and shift a window slightly so your columns can line up. Question the odd one out If one beam, slab, footing, or connection looks much heavier than all the others, stop...
6 months ago • 1 min read
A small nib wall can make your slab model look much better than it really is. In one suspended slab model, the deflection was around 6 mm with the nib wall included. But as soon as the nib wall was removed, the deflection jumped to around 20 mm. Same slab. Same loads.Very different result. So what happened? The software thought the nib wall was helping to hold the slab up. Because of that, the slab was getting extra restraint at that location. But was it actually? That is the important...
6 months ago • 1 min read