What a structural engineer really does?

Structural engineers' main scope of work is the prediction of how a a structure will behave under external loading conditions. They plan, design and analyse structural components and structural systems to achieve design goals and ensure the safety and comfort of users or occupants.

When you look at a building you need a number of professionals to come together to create the final product that is that structure now these range from the structural engineer and the architect that makes the look of the building and how people interact with the building the mechanical engineer that has to do with the airflow in the building and making sure that people are comfortable inside a hydraulic engineer that has to do with the water in and out of that structure and the electrical engineer which is obviously provides lighting any electrical ports inside and out.

These are the primary functions that you need to ensure that you get an operational building now I'm going to focus on the difference between what an architect does and what a structural engineer does so what a structural engineer does they essentially design the bones of the building or the substructure that's involved with like columns rafters and other elements that help stabilize the building where the architect is involved with overall fabric and how people interact with their building so often when we build our drawings and what we look at as a structural engineer is often covered up by the facade that the architect encases that structure in Structural Engineers what do we do engineers we need to make sure that the structure is able to withstand any forces that may see through its lifetime and these forces are broken into really two main primary aspects these are either gravity forces or lateral forces gravity forces are pretty self-explanatory. so they are anything that's within the structure that causes weight in the structures these are broken into a number of different subcategories as well you have dead load and self-superimposed dead load which is normally permanently on the structure so these are things like the substructure of the building and also finishes and facades and we have live loads that are transient in nature that are things like people moving in and out of the building now there are lateral loads that are perpendicular to gravity these are things like earthquake and wind and even out of balanced soil loads that cause the structure to move sideways we have to make sure that we count all of these forces in our design to ensure the structure is stable the skills required to be a structural engineer as a structural engineer you need to be good at maths and physics as that's primarily where you're going to focus your technical aspects of your career you also need to be good at problem solving and solving puzzles because as lot of the time you'll have a problem that's thrown by the architect they want to achieve some aspect of their design and it's not necessarily a clear way that you can achieve the solution so looking at potentially out of the box solutions and different ways that you can achieve what the architect wants to achieve one of the ideas i like to smash is that engineering is not creative i think this is not true at all because when you think about some of the best designs they have to have be truly innovative this is what makes engineering an art form and really hard to master now this can also be seen in some of the great churches that have been built around the world where some of the best architects and some of the most creative minds that you can see have created masterpieces where they also had to be architects but they were also to be engineers to be able to build the masterpieces that you can see today none other than La Sagrada Familia made by Gaudí in Spain it's really a marvel to see the eye and has pushed the boundaries of structural engineering even today the responsibility a structural engineer has when you design a building you have the ability to affect many people's lives as whether it's an office space you potentially affect someone's work whether it's someone's house where they live somewhere where they've built their home so when you become workout instructions you should hold your head with pride with the ability of the work that you do and the way that you affect society around you a bit.

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