Howard, All one needs do is find out how it is done in the metric world. The Us has it easy. They have the experience of the whole world to fall back on.
Jerry ________________________________ From: Howard Ressel <[email protected]> To: U.S. Metric Association <[email protected]> Sent: Thursday, February 5, 2009 9:35:57 AM Subject: [USMA:42885] Re: Fwd: RE: Difficulty of calculating steel members? 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
