The necessity of more structures warrants the demand of civil engineers who can guarantee standard services. Filipino civil engineers are known to be globally competitive. They exert full effort when doing projects to ensure their client’s contentment upon their performances. With this, vast number of Filipino civil engineers has achieved excellence advancing their trademark of their field of work nationwide and worldwide.
The success of engineers start at their training grounds. Civil engineers must practice their profession through quality education that they can get from universities that render the Bachelor of Science in Civil Engineering Program. A lot of standard universities are available here in the Philippines such as the University of the Philippines (UP), De Las Salle University Manila (DLSU), Ateneo de Manila University (ADMU), University of Sto. Tomas (UST), and the University of Southeastern Philippines (USeP). These universities are certified by reliable accrediting associations such as the Philippine Accrediting Association of Schools, Colleges, and Universities (PAASCU). Also, they produce excellent graduates that are among the CE Licensure Exam passers with high-passing rate.
Structural Failure:
An Inferior Knowledge
“Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently....” (Henry Ford) Engineers are intelligent people with incredible skills which respond to the needs of our society by building infrastructures such as tall buildings, bridges and roads. And most importantly, all of these should be functioning as how it should be. However, failure may lead to determining the level of the performance of the creation. Hence, engineers must struggle to design in such a way to avoid colossal failure and damage to the society, and, more importantly, catastrophic failure which could result mess of loss and damage to the property, inevitably, injuries or loss of lives. So, it is, indeed, very important to be knowledgeable on what (engineers plans) to do. Analyzing and studying cases of engineering disasters, engineers can and have learned what not to do and creating designs with less of a chance to fail. Engineers should study the plan strictly and precisely because if they do not take it strenuously serious, the plan will break down and will take serious damage and risk around whatever is around the structure. Inferiority of knowledge in your own discipline specifically to Structural Designs, the topic, would end up to a disaster. What are ought to be common mistakes are valuable when to test the creation’s level of performance.
In setting up the structure, engineers analyze and design the plans, strenuous to think of, intensely. Structural failure, not the design but the structure itself is helpless to stand. Major causes of this includes lack of good quality materials and lack of inspection. Buying cheaper materials and equipment in order to lower the expenses isn’t really a good thing to start off. Assuming that you have saved a lot of money but the quality it gives may be lacking in strength and may cause the building to collapse. On 4 April 2013, a building collapsed on tribal land in Mumbra, a suburb of Thane in Maharashtra, India. It has been called the worst building collapse in the area. 74 people died, including 18 children, 23 women, and 33 men, while more than 100 people survived. The search for additional survivors ended on 6 April 2013. The building failure appeared to be the result of poor-quality building material and having been "weakly built", according to Police inspector Digamber Jangale and Police commissioner K.P. Raghuvanshi. Lawful building construction in Thane district requires blueprints to be filed and approved by municipal agencies and permits obtained to connect electricity, water and sewage services. The builders did not file the blueprints in this case. (2013 Thane building collapse). This is said to be the most tragic disaster that involves collapse in the country. Because of that, all engineers, workers and other officials including the owner and few people who survived in the incident are arrested.
On the other side, Lack of inspection also afflicts the structure too, to preserve the strength of the structure, engineers should inspect the structure every year so that they can find any cracks or leaks to maintain the stability and to repair the damage of the structure. Engineers and experts must inspect the plan because it is required to the law to avoid violations and errors. One case of which is the Silver Bridge. The bridge failure was due to a defect in a single link, eye-bar 330, on the north of the Ohio subsidiary chain, the first link below the top of the Ohio tower. A small crack was formed through fretting wear at the bearing, and grew through internal corrosion, a problem known as stress corrosion cracking. The crack was only about 0.1 inches (2.5 mm) deep when it went critical, and it broke in a brittle fashion. Growth of the crack was probably exacerbated by residual stress in the eyebar created during manufacture. The bridge was a victim of insufficient redundancy. When the lower side of the eyebar failed, all the load was transferred to the other side of the eyebar, which then failed by ductile overload. The joint was then held together only by three eyebars, and another slipped off the pin at the center of the bearing, so the chain was completely severed. Collapse of the entire structure was inevitable since all parts of a suspension bridge are in equilibrium with one another. Witnesses afterward estimated that it took only about a minute for the whole bridge to fall. Analysis showed that the bridge was carrying much heavier loads than it had originally been designed for and had been poorly maintained. (Wiki Silver Bridge 2009). Even a tiny crack could lead to a colossal disaster. It is reported that a 0.1 inch crack have decreased its capacity to carry more loads and due to overloading it collapsed.
Another inferiority scopes the Foundation Failure. Failure of the foundation, or a structure’s base, is less common than bad design and faulty construction. However, it could still lead to significant problems. Foundation failure can be caused by poor soil conditions, poor installation, a foundation that is not large enough for the load of the structure, or earthquakes. Many building foundations are not properly designed and constructed for the existing site soil conditions. Since suitable land is often not available, buildings are constructed on soil that has inadequate bearing capacity to support the weight of the structure. Furthermore, the near surface soils may consist of expansive clays that shrink or enlarge as the moisture content is changed. Movement of foundation may occur if the clay moistening and drying is not uniform. Vegetation, inadequate drainage, plumbing leakage, and evaporation, may cause soil variation. The top soil layers provide the bearing capacity to hold the structure, and ensure stability of the foundation. If the bearing soil is inadequately compacted preceding construction, the foundation may be affected by settlement. A well-known example of foundation failure is the Leaning Tower of Pisa in Italy. The tower was built in 1178 on sandy, unstable soil with an inadequate foundation. The soil shifted and the tower began to lean almost right after construction began. Over the centuries, the tower leaned more and more. Modern construction methods have finally slowed down the movement of the tower and returned it to the angle at which it was leaning in 1870. (Nelson Science Chapter 11). It turns out that engineers aren’t completely keen in regards to where they should build these structures. There are many cases of these problems that should be looked at.
In this study, Failure in structure and foundation is classified to be an inferiority of knowledge which takes a room for improvement to human knowledge and to the world. However, these knowledge could still lead the humanity to its extinction. Every little failure still affects people and the environment, it could be little or huge damage to the society. As engineers, we need to show that having a failure is not an option, though making mistakes are inevitable but one thing that engineers should keep in mind that people’s lives are at risk because of these mistakes. Be smart and keen in every side when making plans. Researchers recommends engineers to have more knowledge to avoid serious disasters. And it is classified that Insufficient of knowledge is 36% of the primary causes of engineering disasters, a blog by Learning from Engineering Disasters. To possess erudition, it requires a lot of, inevitably, mistakes. So how many failures you would like to happen before you learn?