We’ve been thinking about iPhone app development for the last few months. It’s interesting to see where the state of the art is in the mobile space. We recently developed and released a Beam Calculator iPhone application. This app calculates beam deflections for simply supported and cantilever beams for a variety of loads. The app shows the closed-form equations and graphs out deflection, slope, shear and moment.

This app was built with Objective-C and the iPhone dev kit, making it a native iPhone app. But I’m curious how a javascript version would have turned out. It would have been easier and probably just as fast. To me Objective-C is everything I don’t like about C/C++ with worse syntax. The only benefit in using Objective-C over javascript is it allows you to take advantage of the slick iPhone UI framework. Which is pretty awesome. Stay tuned to see which language we decide to use for our next iPhone app. And if you have any suggestions for a civil engineering based iPhone app, let us know.

Today we’re excited to announce our first WebStructural How To. This one shows you how to design a steel I-Beam using WebStructural. Check it out here: How To Design a Steel I-Beam

Happy Engineering!

WebStructural is a fairly powerful tool. We’re excited about how it has grown over the last few months and have enjoyed making improvements and expansions. Our vision is to provide easy to use structural engineering software that requires no manuals, no downloading, is always up-to-date with current codes and is affordable. We hope to continue to expand the program so that engineers and designers are able to use it as their primary structural engineering software for:

• Steel Beam design software
• Wood Beam design software
• Concrete Beam design software
• Steel Column design software
• Wood Post design software
• Concrete Column design software
• Foundation and Footing design software
• Retaining Wall design software
• Shear Wall design software
• Moment Frame design software
• Braced Frame design software
• Anchor Bolt and Base Plate design software (ACI Appendix D)
• Steel Connection software (AISC)

On that note, a lot of time and effort has and will continue to go into the development of this structural engineering software. As a result, we envision a premium version of WebStructural offered at a low and reasonable price. We’ll continue to offer full design capability of limited shapes and materials for many of the modules as free engineering software. This way anyone can design a beam and try the software and infrequent users or those who just want to learn more about structural engineering software will be able to do so.

WebStructural is great for homework too! It’s a great tool to help students validate homework problems for steel, wood or general statics problems. You can validate steel problems with full AISC steel design checks and shapes. Validate wood with NDS wood deisgn checks (coming soon) and our lumber database (available now). Still getting the hang of shear and moment diagrams? Use WebStructural to validate and reinforce what you’re learning in your statics classes.

It’s really cool to see engineers using WebStructural as a learning tool. It’s great to know that our free beam design and analysis tool is helping students become great engineers. If you’re not already using WebStuctural for your coursework we encourage you to give it a shot and see if it can help you become a better engineer by better understanding the design codes you’re using today.

NDS Wood Design

We’re working on adding NDS Wood Design into WebStructural. We’ve got some lumber shapes and materials added in. The total number of shapes and wood materials that we think we have to support is kind of mind boggling! We’ve put Visually Graded Lumber materials into a tree categorized by Species and Grade. Seems to be a logical way to organize them. Wood design is being integrated into the current beam flexure module so you’ll be able to easily switch between wood and steel with out needing to build a new model.

You can try out the analysis and deflection checks portion of the wood module now. We’re still working on the design checks and hope to have them done soon. We will be incorporating Cd and lambda into the ASD and LRFD wood checks, respectively and will be adding more wood shapes and materials in the near future. If you have any suggestions as to how you’d like see wood design laid out let us know!

Bracing

We’ve improved the bracing dialog to include equal spaced bracing. We’re much happier with the bracing functionality and we think you will be too once you try it out!

Look and Feel

We’ve made some minor look and feel changes. We’re starting to get a theme going and looking to converge on a look and feel for the rest of the calculation modules. Again, we’re open to suggestion so don’t hesitate to let us know what we can do to make the layout easier on your eyes.

Thanks to Garrett Drake

Hope it’s okay to put his name in here but I wanted to send a shout out to Garrett Drake for his excellent feedback. Many of the changes we’ve made to this structural engineering web app in the last few weeks have been in response to his feedback. Thanks Garrett!

Well, that’s enough writing for an engineer for like at least a month!

Happy Engineering ;)

Does that title sound odd? I don’t know.

I was able to finally try out WebStructural this weekend on the iPad and it looked and functioned amazing! While building out WebStructural, our version of structural engineering software in web app form, we’ve been testing it on various browsers including Safari. So it’s not a huge surprise to know that it worked so well on it. But to see it in action made me realize the true potential of cloud-based engineering. Even my wife, who is not an engineer, commented on how amazing it worked. The fact is, I was designing AISC steel beams using full (complete) LRFD and ASD specs in a matter of seconds with a touch interface. No installation, just point to the beam-flexure url and go! Pretty cool. So if you have an iPad or similar tablet device that can render HTML 5 pages, check it out and let us know what you think!

Quick post today, but I'm sure we'll have more to write about this in the future. Happy Engineering!

Okay, Twitter has nothing to do with saving and loading but we’re on Twitter: @WebStructural. We also wanted to give a shout out to @ModernSteel for following us back! Anyway, for those Twitter nuts out there, let us know by following @WebStructural.

Okay, now the actual point of this post. We’ve implemented a version 1 Project Manager. The Project Manager allows you to save and load your projects and organize files. To try out the Project Manager login and click the “Create a New Project” button. This will allow you to create a Project and associated folder to save your calculations to. Currently you can create sub-folders 1 level deep. This allows you to further organize your calcs within your Project.

We’re still experimenting a bit with the user interface and we’d really like your feedback so let us know what we can do to make the Project Manager even better. For example, we will be adding the ability to move calcs in and out of projects.

When the idea of web based structural engineering software was first presented to me, I was a little skeptical of how successful it could be. At the time, I didn’t fully understand what “cloud computing” or “in the cloud” meant. I am not personally the type to run out and buy the newest gadgets or quickly embrace new technologies. Maybe it has something to do with being an engineer since many of my colleagues seem to have the same habits.

Nonetheless, as I began to consider the idea of being able to run calculations and access project information from essentially any PC, tablet, or smart phone, I quickly understood how this new idea had some weight. As I look at the current structural engineering analysis and design software that I used, I feel trapped in the tech-boom era of the mid-ninety’s. Sure, there are regular updates, and companies like Enercalc, Strucalc, etc. try to keep things current, but the general user experience is the same. Maybe this is a good thing. If nothing changes, I don’t have to think about re-learning a piece of software; but the fact of the matter is that technologies are changing and will continue to – even for structural engineers.

The question is which ones will stick. One thing seems certain: cloud computing, where software and services are housed on a network rather than a PC, is expected to change the way most of us use computer software. According to Pew Research, 71% of some 900 technology expects believe that by 2020 most people won’t do their work with software running on a general purpose personal computer. We intend to be able to provide this type of software to structural engineers when they are ready to make the paradigm shift, and hopefully it will be exactly what they expect.

If you’ve been practicing structural engineering for any amount of time you’ve probably heard of EnerCalc and StruCalc. Both of these apps are a great value compared to some of the bigger structural analysis and design apps like RISA 3D and SAP2000. Now, for most engineers, a 3D app is a necessity but usually it’s not your main analysis and design tool. For example, many of the engineering firms I know of use EnerCalc for hours a day almost every day. And they’re turning out good designs, quickly. Now, there is a time and place for full 3D analysis but think about all the projects that simply don’t require a 3D analysis.

This is what I love about EnerCalc and StruCalc. Both programs solve a simple problem: they increase productivity. I admire developers who know how to properly frame their problem domain and simply solve the problem they set out to solve when they started developing their product. I can think of countless counter-examples in the structural engineering domain where companies add features without a clear understanding of the problem they should be solving. Usually, these features only make the software more difficult (and painful) to use.

You’ve heard me talk about good design before on this blog. EnerCalc, while not exactly the most fluid or painless experience, has some nice design qualities. Quick, simple structural analysis and design is obviously a good thing and it’s one thing they’ve done well. Just look at how many engineers pay for the program.

We want to take this knowledge and make WebStructural an even better experience at a fraction of the cost. Starting with a simple goal: you should be able to design a beam in minutes the first time you start using the software. That means a minimal learning curve! Not only should WebStructural be a painless experience, it should produce meaningful and concise design output so that you can quickly interpret the results and move on to the next design. Finally, the interface and reports should be professional and elegant so that you can give your clients consistent, solid designs.

We had a fairly productive Thanksgiving holiday at WebStructural! In addition to hanging out with family and eating some of my wife's amazing food (she went to culinary school) I managed to sneak in some programming. Based on some great feedback we received last week we have implemented a few parametric shapes. For now, we support the following shapes:

• Rectangles
• Hollow Rectangles
• Rounds
• Pipes

The interface is not quite perfect yet (inspired by a few Margaritas and too much food) and we currently do not support steel design for these shapes, but it’s a start.

You can select a parametric shape by clicking the Shape Icon then choosing Parametric Shapes then choose a shape from the sub-menu. Let us know what type of parametric shapes you need.

When you start using WebStructural’s Beam Flexure module you’ll notice that we do not restrict you to statically determinate beams. About the only requirement for this module is that the beam is stable. Now, if you remember back to your statics class, you’ll recall that a statically determinate beam is one in which you have an equal number of unknowns and equations. This fundamentally limits the number of boundary conditions you can place on a beam. As your boundary conditions become more complex and the number of spans increase, beams quickly become statically indeterminate. Of course, there are closed-form solutions for statically indeterminate beams but they are limited to a few special cases.

Eventually, you’ll need to solve a statically indeterminate beam for which a closed-form solution is too tedious to derive. We want to enable you to solve any arbitrarily supported and loaded beam or column. This is where a numerical technique called finite element analysis (FEA) comes in. FEA breaks a structure into a matrix of small springs. We can use this matrix to solve for the displacement field and back calculate forces and stresses. Until recently, this has been a fairly expensive task limited by CPU speed and memory. But as virtually everything in computing continues to get cheaper it can now be easily achieved on standard web servers.

We think this is pretty cool, as it allows you to solve complex beams from almost anywhere via a simple web interface. This is what we’re doing with WebStructural. If you’re interested in the details, read on.

For those brave souls still reading...here we go. First of all, we love Javascript. It’s the language of the future and it, above all others is the dominate language of the modern web. So, we do alot in Javascript. All of the user interface is done with Javascript and JQuery. By using Javascript for the interface you get a fluid, dynamic experience that does not require a page refresh every time something on the page changes.

So that’s the front end stuff. Now let’s discuss the back end. Once you’re ready to design a beam we wrap up all the data in a nice Python compatible format and send it off to the server. On the server we unwrap the data sent from the browser, build up our numerical model and solve it using our Python-based finite element analysis engine. At this point, if you’ve asked for design results, we perform design checks in Python. Once we’ve analyzed and design the beam we wrap it up and send it back to the browser. Again, we use Javascript to present the results avoiding annoying page refreshes.

Now there’s just a bit more to it than that but that’s pretty much the basic flow. Our next task is to implement saving and loading so that you can build up a project full of beams, columns, floors and walls. If you have questions or would like more a more detailed explanation of our tech please let us know.

Finally, we’ve already received some really great feedback on the site and we’re excited to continue developing WebStructural to make it a powerful tool for structural engineers and architects. Stay tuned for more exciting features!

Being engineers, good web design doesn’t come easy to the WebStructural Team. We know elegant code, elegant equations and elegant structures; but building an elegant website is another story entirely. Despite our engineering handicap, we love beautiful design and we want to become better designers everywhere in our lives.

Web design is a deep field that we simply don’t have time to master. But I think we can become better designers by simply being more aware of good design. I once heard someone say that beautiful design implies strength and power. In architecture, a beautiful structure is one that you want to explore and would feel safe exploring. For some reason this resonates with me and it’s something that’s in the back of my mind as we continue developing the WebStructural interface and user experience.

Think of your favorite piece of software. I’m willing to bet that it just does things that you expect it to do. You probably feel empowered and maybe even proud to use it, kind of like a secret weapon. This is easier said than done and we’re pretty far from this goal with WebStructural. But it’s a big goal for us.

Since the complexity of this app can only increase from here, we need to be diligent about not bloating or over-complicating the interface. For example, we consciously use a limited number of colors and only add icons and images when they make sense. Sounds pretty obvious right? Well, if you spend any time on the web you might think otherwise.

My personal design preference is to keep things simple and clean. That’s what we’re trying to do with this app. We want it to be easy for you to use, but powerful enough that you feel confident using it on real projects. If you have any suggestions that might make WebStructural easier and more powerful for your particular application let us know!

Hello World!

In this, our first post, we’d like to take a moment to introduce WebStructural to you. And tell you a bit about how WebStructural can (hopefully) make your job easier.

As software becomes more pervasive in our lives, we expect more from it. Software that looks and behaves like it was built 20 years ago is becoming increasingly unacceptable. With this idea in mind, we set out to develop structural engineering software that is powerful, easy to use and modern. While WebStructural is far from complete, it is the beginning of what we hope will become an elegant tool to help you quickly solve a wide range of structural engineering problems.

Furthermore, as WebStructural grows, so too does our comprehensive automated test-suite. Developing software based on unit tests, also known as test-driven development, ensures our code remains stable and correct so that you can use WebStructural with confidence.

WebStructural requires zero installation. It's accessible anywhere you have access to the web and we are working on a mobile layout to accommodate most modern mobile phones with web browsing capabilities!

Currently WebStructural will check steel beams for flexure and shear using AISC design specs with an option to include custom bracing configurations. Our next planned update will add steel beam-column checks. Wood checks will follow this release.

If you have suggestions, comments or criticism do not hesitate to let us know!