“If We Make a Mistake, It Could Be Disastrous”

Structural engineering is considered a part of civil engineering, but there is a movement afoot to separate the two. In typical construction practice, the structural engineer and the civil engineer are different and some structural engineers advocate separate licensing as well.
"Our job is to make sure a building stands up long enough for people to get out safely" in the event of a catastrophe such as an earthquake that causes the building to collapse, said Douglas Antholz, an associate at KPFF Consulting Engineers and president of St. Louis SEAKM (Structural Engineers Association of Kansas and Missouri).

"We have a huge impact on safety and we think we should be treated differently from other engineers," he said. Antholz and SEAKM want Missouri to join Illinois and 11 other states with separate licenses for the practice of structural engineering.

According to the Structural Engineering Institute, the required course of study for a bachelor of science degree in engineering has been reduced at most universities over the years from 150 credit hours to 124 - meaning that many graduates have not had all the courses needed to design with the various structural materials used in modern structures - while structural design and building codes have become more complicated.

In Missouri, someone who passes a general civil engineering test that has little structural content can still practice structural engineering, "although ethically they should not," Antholz said. Or one could take a multiple-choice structural engineering exam. SEAKM would like to see structural engineers required to pass a structural engineering test in which they have to work out problems and show their work - analogous to the way Missouri has replaced multiple choice tests for grade school students with "constructed response" tests in which students have to show their work to show that they can read, write, and do arithmetic.

"We do need to know more," said Richard Bulczak, senior structural engineer at Heideman Associates. "Structural codes have gotten thicker, there is more information we need to know and more we need to check," he said.

"Our designs are location specific based on the soil conditions at each specific site. And we have to look at different materials both because at different locations different materials are readily available and because we offer developers options - different solutions based on what is most constructable, what is the cheapest, and what is the fastest to build," he said.

Ingenious One
The first documented engineer was a structural engineer, Imhotep, who built a famous stepped pyramid in Saqqarah, Egypt, for Pharaoh Netjerikhet (or Djoser) around 2600 BC. He is considered the inventor of building with shaped stones. Imhotep wanted to build something that would last for ages and after 4600 years his monument to Netjerikhet still stands. It is regarded as the world's oldest known stone structure.

It was admiration for such impressive structures that gave birth to the term "engineer" - literally "ingenious one" - in the eleventh century.

Today, "the structural engineer's role is to take the architect's concept and put numbers to how the building holds up. We're concerned with how the building gets used and where it is located. An office is different from a school, an industrial building is different from a highrise residential building.

Each one is subject to different loadings due to the use that is put on it," Antholz said. When structural engineers talk about location it is shorthand for the environmental loads that will be put on a structure from snow, earthquakes, and wind.

Structurally ingenious local projects include the Roberts Tower, Brauer Hall, and the Chaifetz Arena. The Roberts Tower downtown is a 20-story structure that, "because it is skinnier than one would like, uses a higher stress concrete for strength," Antholz said. At Brauer Hall at Washington University, the structure has to span large open spaces while carrying heavy interior loads. Normally that would call for a steel structure, but because it is a laboratory building with equipment and experiments that are sensitive to vibration, it was built using concrete instead. The Chaifetz Arena "has an all-exposed structure with large spans, and the structure has to be stronger because you're hanging things from it. Normally you wouldn't do that," Antholz said.

A big boost to ingenuity, he said, came from computer modeling. "When Barnes Tower was built in the 1960s, all the math was done by hand. Now you throw it all into a computer and you actually design a building several times as the architect makes changes," Antholz said. "It is very advantageous for the owner," Bulczak added. "It gives us the opportunity to give clients several alternatives and to be less conservative in the design," he explained.

Owners and developers, however, often seem blind to - or uninterested in - the role of ingenuity. "They treat us like a commodity," Antholz said. "The structural engineer can have a huge affect on the cost of constructing a building based on his design, but owners don't see what we contribute, so they are fee shopping and changing firms," he said. Fee shopping is looking for the lowest first price without regard for quality or ultimate cost. "The discounting is brutal," Antholz added. "There was one job we bid where the owner wanted us to discount our fee 50 percent," he said.

A Patented Difference

One way for engineering firms to rise above commoditization of their services is to create a perceived methodological or technological advantage with potential clients. FDH Engineering Inc., a structural, geotechnical, and civil engineering firm based in Raleigh, NC, which has an office in St. Louis, has done just that. One of the firm's founders, J. Darrin Holt, PhD, is a university-trained researcher who developed methods for using radar and digital signal processing to assess the depth and strength of buried concrete foundations for a variety of structures, including telecommunication towers and bridges. FDH received a business process patent in 2009 for a method for mapping concrete foundations.

"We started out doing nondestructive testing of foundations, which led to structural engineering to re-engineer structures," said Vice President Christopher Murphy. "Our investigative process is patented." FDH has successfully used its methodology, including the fact that the process is patented, as a branding position.

Deacon Farrelly, manager of business development in FDH Engineering's St. Louis office, said the patented process "mostly helps us get contracts with departments of transportation." In Louisiana, he said, the company's process helped FDH establish the firm's capabilities in its effort to secure inspection assignments on the state's program to assure the safety of approximately 1,000 bridges. In Kansas, the state has referred contractors on its bridge safety program to FDH when they encounter uncertain foundation conditions. Farrelly said those recommendations are based in part on the credibility established by the patented process.

What FDH patented was not the technology - radar and digital signaling - used to assess the structures, nor was the firm laying claim to exclusivity of the results obtained from using their process. What was patented was the actual methodology (process) they had devised for obtaining those results. For example, all hamburgers have meat, buns and condiments: It's how you put them together that makes the difference. No one else puts a burger together quite like McDonald's - or that's what McDonald's believes. McDonald's 2006 U.S. and European patent application WO2006068865 relates to the "pre-assembly of sandwich components and simultaneous preparation of different parts of the same sandwich". It covers the "simultaneous toasting of a bread component" and heating a "meat and/or cheese filling". And it says the company has invented a way to add garnishes and condiments using a "sandwich assembly tool".

John Roedel, partner at Senniger Powers LLP and a prominent patent attorney said that business process patents are difficult to defend. A company can patent the process it uses to get a result, but the patent might not hold up if competitors can show the process was in public use at least a year before the application was made. Further, the alleged patent violator must incorporate all of the steps involved in the patented process - not just some of them - for a violation to be upheld.

The U.S. Supreme Court might change all that, Roedel said. The patent world, he said, is anxiously awaiting the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in a case known as Bilski v. Kappos, on which the Court heard oral arguments last November on an appeal of a Federal Circuit Court decision that patents cannot be granted on methods for handling information. Roedel noted that a decision in that case could directly affect FDH Engineering's patent.

Meanwhile FDH is finding the patent to be a valuable tool in establishing its expertise with potential clients. "We have an application pending for a patent that relates to determining the tension in tension rods or anchor tendons in dam construction," Murphy said.

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