Holdfast Training Services Trial Blog

It’s been some time since my last blog as I was away for a bit on holiday, it was great to see everyone out in Oz. I have now been back to work for a few weeks and am safely embedded in the Robert Bird Group (RBG) Construction Engineered Solutions (Temp Works) Team. I asked to go into this department in the hope it would allow me to get plenty of short, sharp tasks that would expose me to a broad range of experience whilst developing my SA skills.

Currently I am designing an embedment plate for two Tower Crane Ties. The example below shows one of the double brackets specified by Terex that I need to connect to the embedment plate I come up with.

I was given un-factored reactions, also by Terex, all of which are acting at point A as annotated on the second Dwg.

Put simply, I am trying to transfer the loads given into my reinforced concrete core wall. I started by factoring the reactions and conducting analysis on the back of the bracket to determine the maximum tensile loads likely to be seen in each bolt position (36mm dia bolts). Ideally my anchorage re-bars  will tie into this plate with couplers that connect to 36mm dia bolts protruding through the holes you see on the dwg, also giving me the tensile load in my anchor rods.

For those who are bored or, particularly for those currently on phase 1 who enjoyed the SA exam twice like I did, it’s a good problem to get a feel for how the technical analysis skills you are taught on phase 1 are used daily in a structural engineer design office. Even after 11 months on site watching Irish blokes pour concrete it didn’t take long for me to get back into the swing of this stuff and weirdly, I’m now actually starting to enjoy it.For obvious reasons I was mildly apprehensive about this phase of placement but as it turns out I find it much easier now I can apply it to real world work.

I’ll try put up some of my workings in a few days but as a starting point you clearly need to design a solution that deals with all the forces acting on the bracket in this condition. The means by which you model this bracket significantly changes your loads. (Note: I also resolved this with the axial force in the opposite direction shown but as it gave a very favourable pre-stress the tension issue is negligible in that condition).

(Once you’ve done it using all three rows of connection points, try deal with the moment using only the central two bolt positions as this is a design constraint I am working through at the moment due to the geometry of the core wall).