I made a mistake in the answer below. She did not teach us to move the decimal point, it was the decimal comma. Sorry. :-)
To compensate for that deception, I am attaching a table that also illustrates my point. It is a typical table I work up for my clients to help them not only with the numbers but also with using that steel which happens to be cheaper to purchase at that time, be it DIN, ISO, ANSI, JIS, whatever. Thus the column of % for compatibility. This was the response to the structural engineer's claim. I said:: Not that it would matter but I wonder which metric God forbids to call: ".... the area of a W36x230 beam shape is 68 in2 or 436 cm² (instead of 43600 mm2)" ? Similarly, "..... the bending section modulus is 837 in3 or 13700 cm³ or 13.7 dm³ (instead of 13700000 mm3)" ? That's the way they taught us to do it in structural engineering 101. Actually before that - in the grade school where the strict Miss teacher taught us moving a decimal point with prefixes. Well, maybe it is not the metric God but rather the inch-pound Satan thatkeeps Americans confused about the mm, unable to distinguish between dimensioning rules and
calculation options. Thereby missing also the handy advantage of working with significant digits only. Stan Jakuba----- Original Message ----- From: "Howard Ressel" <[email protected]>
To: "U.S. Metric Association" <[email protected]> Sent: 09 Feb 04, Wednesday 14:54 Subject: [USMA:42876] Fwd: RE: Difficulty of calculating steel members?
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) 272-3372I 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. Hope this helps. Stephen J. P________ Jr., P.E. Associate / Structural Engineer -----Original Message----- From: Howard Ressel [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Monday, January 26, 2009 8:42 AM Subject: Fwd: [USMA:42472] Difficulty of calculating steel members? What do you think of this? Is it really harder to design steel in metric? -- "Go for a Metric America" Howard Ressel Project Design Engineer, Region 4 (585) 272-3372On 1/24/2009 at 6:16 PM, in message<[email protected]>, Paul Armstrong <[email protected]> wrote:I got the following reply to a video on YouTube. While I did engineering in university, I'm a sysadmin so dealingwithsteel members isn't something I've had to do at a practical level. Anyone understand how this could make sense (I know, there's no detail, it's just a random assertion)?help center | e-mail options | report spam GenScripter has made a comment on Why We Need Metric - My Story: You clearly aren't a structural engineer. Steel members using the metric system are far more difficult to calculate and designatethanthe imperial unit members. The metric system isn't a panacea. You can reply to this comment by visiting the comments page. (c) 2009 YouTube, LLC
Beam TEC.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document
