Hello and welcome to Structures 101, I created this site to put together resources that I’ve studied / find usefull. It would be great to discuss structural engineering and similar areas with others.

The aim is to help anyone with an interest to shed light on a profession that many recognise but few actually know what goes on behind the scenes in an office or on a construction site.

Hopefully you’ll enjoy the site and resources here and it can help answer a few questions that interest you or aid in the development of your career or perhaps even let you tackle your own DIY projects and save some money. Of course, if you want any topic covered, please let me know by comments or by the contact form. Please be aware I cannot legally give advice due to insurance purposes.

Image Academic Background I’m Tom and I am a practising structural engineer, working currently in a small civil and structural engineering consultancy in the United Kingdom. I have an MEng in Civil/Structural engineering, awarded a first class honors and obtained a scholarship in the third year.

I have experience in civil, predominately the rail sector, steel fabrication, including connection and frame design and structural engineering. The latter varying from domestic house through to complex commercial buildings, with some rather odd ball jobs thrown in such as pressure vessels and silos. Again the latter is the current day job.

Engineering Interests So far the most appealing part of structural engineering for me is steel connection design, each connection presents a unique little puzzle to solve with many possible solutions and multiple ways in which to get to the solution. I also credit my understanding of connection design to my overall understanding of how a structure actually works and the most efficient ways to design them.

During my academic studies I was heavily invested in finite element methods (FEM or FE) and completed my first thesis on non linear analysis of beams with openings using FE and the second thesis on dynamic analysis of beams with openings, again using FE. It is amazing how we can closely approximately to very level degrees of accuracy the structural behavior using computer models.

Image Image Personal Background Outside of the office, I enjoy racket sports, badminton and squash, playing pool or snooker, or generally anything I can do competitively. My mind can tend to wander and in the past few years I’ve found myself studying languages, Russian and Spanish mainly.

One of the most recent explorations is coding and web design, this site is sure helping.