On Wednesday 04 February 2009 14:54:24 Howard Ressel wrote: > This was a bit back but i received a response from a structural engineer > friend of mine and he tends to agree. > -- > > "Go for a Metric America" > Howard Ressel > Project Design Engineer, Region 4 > (585) 272-3372 > > > > > I would agree that designing steel in metric is not as user friendly. > The steel section properties are typically mm2, mm3 or mm4 and are > very > large numbers. For example the area of a W36x230 beam shape is 68 in2 > or 43600 mm2. Similarly, the bending section modulus is 837 in3 or > 13700000 mm3. The larger values are not that easy to work with.
For the bending section modulus, we can say it's 13.7 liters, even though it's not a volume. The second moment of area is on the order of millions of quartic millimeters, and since there's a 10^12 ratio between the quartic millimeter and the quartic meter and powers of 10 that aren't powers of 1000 are avoided, the numbers are unwieldy. I think the solution is to give a name to the quartic meter, even though I know of no other use for it, so that the prefix "micro" can be attached to it. Pierre
