If and when we go metric in steel design i am sure the industry will
work through some of these problems. 
-- 

"Go for a Metric America"
Howard Ressel
Project Design Engineer, Region 4
(585) 272-3372


>>> On 2/4/2009 at 3:50 PM, in message
<[email protected]>,
Pierre Abbat <[email protected]> wrote:

> 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
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