Page 9 - Handbook of Civil Engineering Calculations, Second Edition

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Steel Institute, National Fire Sprinkler Association, National Precast Concrete Association, Portland
Cement Association, Precast/Prestressed Concrete Institute, along with other organizations.
• “Green” building design and construction to reduce energy costs in new, existing, and rehabilitated
buildings.
• Major steps to improve indoor air quality (IAQ) for all buildings well beyond elimination of occupant
smoking of cigarettes, cigars, or pipes. IAQ is of major concern in office buildings, schools, hotels,
factories, and other buildings having even modest tenant occupancy numbers.
• Better hurricane and tornado design of buildings and bridges is being implemented for new structures,
following the damages caused by Hurricane Katrina and similar storms. Designers want to make new
structures as hurricane- and tornado-proof as possible. This is an excellent goal, remembering the number
of lives lost in hurricanes and tornados.
• Improved construction of, and wave resistance for, buildings in the tsunami areas of the world is a new
goal for civil engineers worldwide. The enormous tsunami of December 26, 2004, that struck 12 Indian
Ocean nations, killing more than 226,000 people, has civil engineers searching for better ways to design
structures to resist the enormous forces of nature while protecting occupants. Civil engineers in Indonesia,
Sri Lanka, India, and Thailand are actively working on structures having greater wind and water resistance.
Also under study are: (a) early-warning systems to alert people to the onset of a tsunami and, (b) better
escape routes for people fleeing affected areas. Achieving these important design goals will, hopefully,
reduce the death and injury toll in future tsunami incidents.
• New approaches to levee and flood wall design, especially in the New Orleans and similar areas where
devastation was caused by high water brought on by hurricanes. In New Orleans alone, some 35+ miles of
flood walls are being redesigned and rebuilt. The T-wall type of structure, covered in this handbook, is
currently favored over the I-wall. The latter type was of little use during Hurricane Katrina because soil
around it was eroded by the water when the wall collapsed backwards. All these changes will be the work
of civil engineers, with the assistance of other specialized professionals.
With so many changes “on the drawing board,” engineers and designers are seeking ways to include the
changes in their current and future designs of buildings, bridges, and other structures. This second edition
includes many of the proposed changes so that designers can include them in their thinking and calculations.
Several new calculation procedures for prestressed concrete members are presented in Section 5. These
calculation procedures will be especially helpful to engineers designing for the future. And this leads us to
consideration of the use of computer programs for civil engineering design work of all types.
While there are computer programs that help the civil engineer with a variety of engineering calculations,
such programs are highly specialized and do not have the breadth of coverage this handbook provides.
Further, such computer programs are usually expensive. Because of their high cost, these computer programs
can be justified only when a civil engineer makes a number of repetitive calculations on almost a daily basis.
In contrast, this handbook can be used in the office, field, drafting room, or laboratory. It provides
industry-wide coverage in a convenient and affordable package. As such, this handbook fills a long-existing
need felt by civil engineers worldwide.
In contrast, civil engineers using civil-engineering computer programs often find data-entry time
requirements are excessive for quick one-off-type calculations. When