Alex Schreyer's Blog, Projects, Books, and More
If you liked Demeter, then you’ll like this one. The Department of Energy has just released a plugin for SketchUp (works with both the free and full version) that allows for an EnergyPlus analysis to be run on a SketchUp building model from within the familiar SketchUp interface. The geometry of a building can be […] Read more..
It seems like this is the year for industry consolidations in the technology field. After Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo and their purchase of Caligari it is now time for Green Building Studio to be acquired by a much larger company, Autodesk in this case. In an announcement that just fluttered into my inbox, GBS acknowledges […] Read more..
Greenbuildingstudio.com, the green-design web-extension for your cad software online service has just announced their third overhaul (i.e. v. 3.0). With more and more architecture and engineering offices embracing parametric building design (catchword: BIM = “Building Information Modeling”), this is a great tool to run a quick industry-standard (DOE-2) energy check on a virtual building and […] Read more..
The DOWEL program is a finite-element modeler for dowel-type connections (e.g. nails, bolts, lag screws) in wood-wood, wood-steel or any other type of connection material configuration. The underlying model has even been used for pile modeling in soil. It calculates load-displacement curves for monotonic and cyclic loading applictions and plots deformed shapes at predefined displacement steps. Material inputs consist of basic material embedment data. All material data is stored in a database that can be appended by the user.
This project, which was completed in the summer of 2003, was aimed at evaluating the structure of a 1918 Western Massachusetts paper mill, which sat empty and had been deteriorating for 13 years. Ultimately, the feasibility of any redevelopment on the site was to be investigated.
To understand the long-term behavior and to test a wood-concrete system in the New England climate, we constructed a 14 ft. slab (the “bridge”), loaded it and have been measuring deflections and strain in the structure since November 2005.
The objective of this study was to investigate the monotonic and cyclic behaviour of different kinds of slender dowel-type fasteners. To accomplish this, four types of fasteners were tested in a series of 73 monotonic and cyclic tests. All tests used either one or two slotted-in steel plates in PARALLAM®, a Parallel Strand Lumber (PSL) product.