What They Didn't Teach Me at University - Stiffness

No university course can teach you everything about engineering, and mine wasn’t an exception. One of the things that I didn’t learn about at uni (or that I missed…) was the use and importance of stiffness in structural analysis. Since uni though, and especially in the last few years I have been gaining a greater appreciation of how useful it can be.

Those Who Don't Know Their (Structure's) History are Condemned to Repeat It

Over the past month or so I have been helping a new colleague start a secondment role at a large industrial site where I have done a lot of work over the past 10 years. In the short time he has been on site there have been at least 4 incidents where damage has been identified in structures where I (as an outside consultant) know more of the history of the issues than those on site seem to (at least so far as I can tell):

The Day I Almost Became a Statistic

About 18 months ago now I came as close as I ever want to be to being an industrial accident statistic. A fairly simple inspection of a small walkway almost ended up in disaster. This post shares some of my thoughts about it, in the hopes that it can help someone else avoid a similar incident.

What Happened

I was inspecting a conveyor structure with one of our graduate engineers, taking measurements for a repair strategy we were developing. While walking back along the conveyor towards the cribroom (we had finished for the day) we noticed that there was a heavily corroded access platform on one of the conveyor trestles. Both of us were concerned that it might be unsafe, so I decided that we needed to take a closer look at it.