Briefing: Activities by IABSE WG8 (Forensic Structural Engineering)

Structural Engineering Forensic Evaluation of Misdiagnosed Concrete Masonry Wall Cracking

Given that concrete masonry walls are expected to experience shrinkage combined with thermal expansion and contraction, and in some cases even carbonation, throughout their service life, cracking is to be expected. However, after concrete masonry walls have been placed into service, originally anticipated and accounted for cracking is often misdiagnosed as a structural defect. Such misdiagnoses...

Technology Briefing Report for Reverse Engineering

Structural Engineering Design Support by Constraint Satisfaction

Design tasks in structural engineering have always involved the use of constraints to formulate design requirements. Most existing algorithms for constraint satisfaction require input consisting of binary constraints on variables that have discrete values. Such restrictions limit their use in structural engineering since typical structural design tasks involve discrete and numerical variables. ...

Engineering Adaptive Digital Investigations using Forensic Requirements

A digital forensic investigation aims to collect and analyse the evidence necessary to demonstrate a potential hypothesis of a digital crime. Despite the availability of several digital forensics tools, investigators still approach each crime case from scratch, postulating potential hypotheses and analysing large volumes of data. This paper proposes to explicitly model forensic requirements in ...

Art and Structural Engineering-Art of Structural Engineering

Beyond the classical dispute between architects and engineers, it is a matter of fact that art and engineering are not only compatible, but also for some cases indissociable. This communication aims to contribute to the debate. In the first part the experience of artists is exemplified in terms of influence on structural engineering : Pevsner and Snelson opened the way to complex surfaces and i...