Hi friends,

Today's newsletter won't be technical as I wanted to share with you what I've been up to recently and how the development of module 3 is going.

I haven't been working on Structural Basics stuff as much as I usually do for the last 3 months. The reason was that I moved to a new apartment with my girlfriend, I went on a few skiing trips, marathon prep and I got involved with real-estate for the first time.

As you are reading this, I’m at the notary’s office signing the contract for my first flat which I will be renting out.

So lot of stuff has happened in my private life. Me and my girlfriend are still adapting to the new apartment which has much more space than we had previously and we are still on the furniture hunt.

Progress in my structural engineering career

Career-wise I've also learned a lot in the last couple of months.

I finished a very challenging refurbishment project of a retail store where we didn't have any drawings or calculations. The client wanted to have a steel staircase in the center of the building. To do that we basically needed to "cut" a large whole in the rc slab which changed the static system.
We opened the concrete locally in many places to find out how much reinforcement was used. We sent concrete core samples and 1m pieces of reinforcement to the labratory to get the material properties. We reinforced the rc slab with CFRP lamellas and did many more things to reinforce the existing structure.

Earlier this month I was invited to the opening of the new retail store. Here are a few pictures.

The last 2 months I've been working on my first larger-scale timber project. I've done many timber roofs and smaller timber structures before, but especially the connection design of larger timber structures is quite different to those residential timber structures which I teach in Module #2.

2 weeks ago I was invited to the Dlubal podcast by Daniel Dlubal which is probably the biggest podcast in the AEC industry here in Germany to talk about Structural Basics, my experience abroad and what digital tools I use.

The podcast is not out yet, but I will share it once it's out. Those of you who remember that I also got invited to a podcast in January. It's still not out, haha. It's a lot of work.

Update on module #3

As I already said: I didn't work that much on module 3 as my time was limited. But I've already come far in October, November and December.

And I have to say: It includes so much knowledge, from how to use FE software to design reinforced concrete slabs, to fire design verifications to vertical and horizontal load transfer to reinforcement sketching and much more. I will give you an overview of what module 3 covers soon. Unfortunately module #3 becomes quite large. I expect it to be at least 150 pages. I am currently at 95 pages.

I finally had a few days off the last 2 weeks to work on module #3 again and I've now covered the calculation and documentation of at least one element of each element group. Like for example I've finished the documentation of the verification of the rc slab above the ground floor but not of the slab above the basement and above the garage.

So most of the work is done. I hopefully finish module #3 before July.

Final words

That was a little update from my side.

I am super hyped what's coming the next few months in my private life, in my job and also with Structural Basics.

I have never felt so much joy in a place as I do now in our new apartment with my girlfriend.

At the same time I am very grateful for how things are playing out recently. Especially for everyone of you who is reading my newsletter each week. I really hope it helps you understand structural engineering better!

With that being said, I see you in the next newsletter.

Let's design better structures,

Laurin

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