Other panelists include:

• Scott Arfsten, Regional BIM Manager, Turner Construction Company
• Digby Christian, Senior Proejct Manager, Sutter Health Support Services
• Hans Lapping, Transactional Shareholder, Miller Starr Regalia

You can view the flyer here:  Innovation & Technology: Building Information Modeling (BIM)

The lunch will run from 11:30am – 1:30pm at Scott’s Seafood Restaurant in Walnut Creek (map).  Register Online by May 18.

April BJG Wallpaper

We are not getting into the product market (yet), but we do have some wallpaper for your computer.  Or backgrounds, if you’d like.

I got the idea from smashingmagazine.com (March calendars on smashing).  I really liked the idea of a wallpaper that functions as a calendar as well.  Soooo, I made my own from a picture I took of a building in Walnut Creek, CA.

Why this building you may ask.  Well, the Pleasanton office helped out with the East Bay CREW Careers program in Febraury.  In short, high school girls come up with a way to revitalize an existing building.  In the process they learn about all of the different careers available in commercial real estate.  Read more about the program here. Teresa organized the event, Reena was a presenter on architecture and I helped to videotape the event.

Also, the building had a very interesting pattern on the north wall.  It works will with our logo, the blue sky, the white pattern, etc.  I am expressing my inner architect!

The building in the the BJG April wallpaper was the building picked for the case study.  It proved to be a great building for the event.  Many speakers spoke on the building, presenting their opinions on the the best use for the building, as well as background into their profession.  Teresa had speakers from the City of Walnut Creek (a planner and an attorney), brokers, environmental consultants, architects and property managers.  Pictures from the day can be found on our flickr page.

Nice high quality .png files can be found on our flickr page.  Lower res jpegs are below (right click and save as on the picture).  The original picture is here. Let me know if you have any suggestions for future wallpapers.  Enjoy!

• 1680×1050
• 1600×1200
• 1280×1024
• 1920×1200
• 1280×960
• 1280×800

“The Reno Toyota Dealership consists of a 64,000 square foot showroom and office facility as well as a 267,000 square foot vehicle storage and maintenance facility. This project incorporates a variety of building materials including reinforced concrete, steel and masonry. The service and vehicle storage area is a four story post-tensioned concrete system with concrete bearing and shear walls. In order to conceal the parking garage appearance, the building is finished with curved vertical steel trusses with an aluminum perforated screen and precast concrete panels. The showroom portion is a two story CMU shear wall building with steel joists and columns. Structural steel is also integrated into the extensive curtain wall system. The dealership was designed in phases in order to make use of the vehicle storage prior to the completion of the entire project. Construction on this project is scheduled to be completed by January 2010 and will be the largest Toyota dealership on the west coast of the United States.”

Our congratulations go out to the other project winners as well as the engineers of the year award :

• For the Environmental Category: North Virginia/Stead Pumping System Improvement Project
• For the Transportation Category: SouthEast Connector Plan Line Study
• For Civil Engineer of the Year: Robert Calloway, PE, PTOE
• For Young Engineer of the Year: Garth Oksol, PE

Rendering of Experiment Setup

On Wednesday, 12/11/08, I attended a dynamic test of a 110-foot long bridge model at the University of Nevada Reno, Large-Scale Structures Laboratory.  This test is part of series of tests to investigate the performance of various technologies to improve bridge performance in earthquakes. The principal investigator is my former advisor, Dr. Saiid Saiidi, but the work is part of a group of researchers that span across the country: University of California San Diego, University of California at Berkeley, Florida International University. The testing is part of an overall network of research: The George E Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) that is sponsored by the National Science Foundation.

The model bridge is about ¼ scale of an actual structure with realistically modeled joints and abutments. The test model has three two-column “bents“ (piers to the non-bridge engineers)  each on its own hydraulically-activated shake table. Each shake table is capable of mimicking earthquake accelerations in two directions.

Each bent in the model is designed to test a different technology – one was set up to test a base isolator design – essentially a special rubber and metal doughnut – to take energy from the earthquake motion and dissipate it as material deformation in the isolator. This method is similar to the way a car’s shock absorber works. Another bent was designed to review the performance of high-strength reinforcement – nickel-titanium alloy. The third bent was designed to test post tensioning (pre-compressing beyond regular structural weight) of the columns.

The test starts rather slowly – a white noise of motion is first fed to the shake tables to calibrate the sensors on the model. This model had already had some tests performed before we were invited to see the “big” test.  The big test caused the model to sway dramatically and some concrete cover on the isolator bent crumbled. Unfortunately for major drama fans, none of the bents failed in a heap. This was fortunate for the audience because we were not all that far away from the model. It really wasn’t dangerous – there are backup safety frames to prevent a collapse.

This was of particular interest to me as I was the BJG lead engineer for designing the lab structure itself. The “strong floor” is three feet of high-strength concrete reinforced with #14 bars at 12” on center top and bottom. There is a basement below the floor for equipment access. The floor has a 2’ x 2’ grid of pipes to allow test fixtures and experiments to be attached to the floor using high-strength threaded rods. This design has proven to be very useful as it is the basis for a similar lab in Korea and for Simpson Strong Tie’s test facility in Stockton, California.

I watched the test standing next to a professor of electrical engineering who was asking questions about the test fixture and methods. It’s been some time since I have been involved in anything like dynamic testing or evaluation but most of my old Master’s work came back through the haze of time to answer his questions. Or at least it sounded good… I did note that the equations for structural stress, strain and motion are of the same form as equations for voltage, amperage and induction. (and that, Ladies and Gentlemen, is all I remember of differential equations) Indeed, the professor stated he could model the experiment on the floor as a circuit of capacitors, inductors and resistors.

The test accelerations are based on Loma Prieta and Slymar Earthquake ground motions. Everyone always wants to know what magnitude earthquake a test represents and the answer is  – none. Really the answer is unknown – Richter magnitude is measure of energy released in an earthquake event. Structures are affected by the resulting accelerations or ground motions – the relationship between the two is highly variable and depends on hypocenter location (the actual break in the ground at depth) and the material types that the energy must pass through. I noted as I watched the local evening news reported the acceleration as equivalent to a magnitude 8.

As this was reported on TV, it must be true.

See this link http://nees.ce.unr.edu/telepresence/ to get more information on the test program and tune into webcasts of the testing.

UPDATE

See this link to a story on NPR regarding the experiment. 

Today, when stopped by, I read that the UNR Concrete Canoe team took first place at the ASCE Mid Pacific Conference at UC Davis. (Sorry, there were a lot of links in that last sentence. As a new blogger I am trying to balance giving information with not making a whole sentence hyperlinked.)

First off, congratulations to the crew at UNR. This is quite an accomplishment. The Mid Pacific region has one of the toughest competitors in the nation: UC Berkeley. They have represented the region 15 times at nationals. Of those 15 finishes, the have only once appeared outside the top 10. They are only one of four schools with back to back first place finishes and the only school to do this twice. All other amazing stats regarding Berkeley can be found here.

Second off, the rise of the UNR Canoe team is simply amazing. The Canoe Team did not exist three years ago. The last time UNR competed was sometime in the mid to late 90s. In three years they have come from non existence, to going to nationals three consecutive years in a row, placing 3rd in 2007. For more on the rise of UNR, go over to http://www.nevadacanoe.com/.

Mid-Pac has produced other canoe powerhouses such as Sacramento (stats, website), and Davis. For UNR to compete so successfully against this level of competition just adds to the legend. (All of these sites have been obtained from concretecanoe.org, an obsessively updated canoe website.)

I cannot emphasize how important student competitions like Concrete Canoe are in the education of undergraduate students. I participated in the Steel Bridge competition for two years while at UNR. I gained many skills that I could never have gathered in the classroom. Not to say that my education was lacking content (quite the opposite), but there are some things best learned in a collaborative, self motivated, student run environment like a design competition.

Some of the best times I had in college were in the bottom of the structures laboratory learning how hard a true pin connection is to fabricate. Without steel bridge, I would have never have learned how to weld, use a chop saw, lay out steel from a self generated set of shop drawings, and maybe most importantly, I would have never seen what a bearing failure in a connection looked like (or how to fix it).

Bottom line, if you are a student, get involved! Steel bridge, concrete canoe, water treatment, anything. While giving a little back, you will get so much more in return.