profile

Structural Basics

Personal insights and calculation guides from the world of structural engineering directly in your inbox.

ClearCalcs column design tutorial
Featured Post

Calculate reinforced concrete columns with software

Hi friends, Great news before getting into today's topic: We will finally launch the e-book about loads of residential buildings next Wednesday (19.03.25). I got my VAT number yesterday and everything is set up. More info about price, what's included, etc. in the coming days. Now to the topic of today. On last week's newsletter, we learned how to calculate and design reinforced concrete columns by hand. Today, I'll show you how I actually design columns. → with software Always keep in mind...

Hi friends, On last week's newsletter, we learned how to calculate and design reinforced concrete beams by hand. Today, I'll show you how to use structural design software to achieve the same. As I said last week, knowing and learning the formulas from Eurocode or other standards is important, as you need to know what inputs you need to insert into the software. And you need to evaluate if the results make sense. Garbage in equals garbage out! But if you are familiar with the formulas,...

Hi friends, In the last 14 episodes of this reinforced concrete series, we learned all fundamentals and the most important design verifications. In the next couple of weeks, we design structural elements like beams, columns, frames, slabs, and much more using the verifications that we learned in the last weeks. In this newsletter, we'll design and verify a reinforced concrete beam. We design the rc beam for bending, shear, cracks and deflection. I did the design calculations in Maple Flow and...

Beam calculation guide

Hi friends, Here on the Structural Basics newsletter I always teach you how to calculate, design and verify structural members by hand - formula by formula - step-by-step. This is important to learn structural engineering. You need to know the formulas. But in reality, every structural engineer today uses software to design structural elements such as beams, columns, slabs, etc. This saves us so much time, you can generate much nicer reports than with your paper hand calculations and (only...