Durability of Concrete Structures

Don’t put yourself or your concrete assets at risk.

Designing and constructing for durability is one of the most important aspects of any construction program. However, requirements for concrete durability are extremely fragmented in Australia. These conflicting requirements put designers, contractors, and asset owners at risk, as there a number of different approaches available that may or may not be appropriate for the specific structure.

In recent times the Concrete Institute of Australia Durability Committee, including some of Australia’s leading durability experts, have been looking at the inconsistent approach to durability issues and how this can be addressed. To highlight this work the Concrete Institute of Australia is presenting a National Seminar Series on the Durability of Concrete Structures with 5 of these leading concrete durability experts delivering a comprehensive series of presentations aligned with the major design issues.

This seminar is an ideal opportunity for designers, contractors, asset owners and suppliers, in all sectors and of all levels of experience, to develop a more consistent approach to durability and to discuss issues of current and future significance with a collection of Australian durability experts, rarely available in one room at the same time.

These 6 topics, presented by our panel of experts, will be discussed, with a view to developing a more consistent approach in the industry:

  • Durability Planning
  • Durability Exposure Zones
  • Design for Compliance
  • Construction for Durability
  • Durability Modelling
  • Durability Testing

Delegates not only get a chance to learn from, debate with, and discuss the issues with our experts, but will also receive two brand new documents on Durability produced by the Institute, as well as being the first to receive draft Durability documents, open for public comment from members and non-members attending the seminar.

With only a few days left to register, don’t miss out on this opportunity to listen to some of the best durability experts in the country!

Register here!

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Section Properties Update

The Section Properties spreadsheet provides formulas for the section properties of 35 different defined shapes, calculation of section properties from coordinates, and interactive calculation and plotting of any chosen shape with defined dimensions:

Section Properties for a Segment of a Circle

Section Properties for a Segment of a Circle

The latest version added the function to combine any number of shapes into a group, and provide section properties for the composite group, or from any composite shape with listed coordinates:

SecPropG2-2

It recently came to my notice that the single shapes were sometimes not plotting correctly in the new version. This has now been fixed, and the new version may be downloaded from: Section Properties-Group.

 

Posted in Excel, Maths, Newton, VBA | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Life in the Universe?

What the Daily Mail said Brian Cox said:

We are alone in the universe: Professor Brian Cox says alien life is all but impossible and humanity is ‘unique’

  • Presenter makes bold claim during BBC documentary
  • He says the spark of life on earth billions of years ago was a fluke
  • ‘We still struggle to understand what happened. It’s incredibly unusual’ 

What Brian Cox said Brian Cox said:

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Three Spoonfuls of Cream

A tribute to Jack Bruce.

 

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Assorted links

A collection of useful Excel and science/engineering related links that I have discovered/rediscovered recently:

Craig Hatmaker’s Beyond Excel:

Everyone knows Microsoft Excel is a powerful data mani-pulation engine, but data lives in databases and only a few Excel experts know how to exploit this natural synergy.

snb’s VBA for Smarties:

This website is dedicated to the use of Visual Basic for Applications (VBA).  VBA is the programming language of Microsoft’s Office and all other software that makes use of it.

VBA has therefore a large amount of ‘libraries’.  Every library contains methods that are specifically suited for each program.
There’s also a specific VBA library,that contains methods that can be used by every VBA-fit program.

VBA offers opportunities to communicate between software: from one program you can give instructions to another using VBA.  Task integration is a VBA benefit that can’t be achieved using the User Interface.

MIT OpenCourseware:

“The idea is simple: to publish all of our course materials online and make them widely available to everyone.”
Dick K.P. Yue, Professor, MIT School of Engineering

And a collection from Alfred Vachris:

Python for Data Science:

This short primer on Python is designed to provide a rapid “on-ramp” to enable computer programmers who are already familiar with concepts and constructs in other programming languages learn enough about Python to facilitate the effective use of open-source and proprietary Python-based machine learning and data science tools.

Whistler Alley Mathematics:

These are some mathematics investigations I have pursued over the years. They may be of some interest to teachers, students, or hobbyists. I try to convey a conceptual understanding, usually without rigorous proof. Some of the lessons are accompanied by questions and suggestions for extensions.

Calculus7

 

 

 

Posted in Excel, Link to Python, Maths, Newton | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment