AE-391 Winter AY2011-12: A3–Grader’s Comments

Grader #1

When making your structural system selections many groups failed to mention any quantitative information. This type of information such as span length and overall building height will help you to compare the capabilities of each system.
For the member sizing section many groups just showed output tables from SAP. It is important that you consolidate this information so that it is more meaningful to the reader. It is only necessary to show the output from the members with the highest moment/shear/deflection because these are the ones you are designing for.
The quality of the structural drawings improved for this assignment. Just be sure that the drawings have all of the proper labeling and that it is easy to read.
Instead of trying to model the entire structure in SAP sometimes it is just easier to simplify the structure to just a beam or two and apply the proper loads. You should find similar results with less work. Just be sure to state your assumptions.

This assignment, in comparison to the past assignments, has shown a lot of improvement in determining relevant, important information and how to illustrate this information clearly and concisely.
In regards to constructive criticism, the most prevalent mistake I found in these submissions was in the “Member Sizing” section. Many teams were able to begin to display the proof that they had completed the analysis, however, the next step after completing the analysis is to sort through all of the information to give the most useful information to the following designers after you. The engineering process is iterative and part of the responsibility is to be able to sift through all of the outputs to give the most relevant information to whoever needs it. A few groups did this very well and summarized the information in a couple of tables. To improve upon this, it would help to summarize all of this information (key members, max shear, max moment, max deflection, etc) in a single table.