This post originally appeared in the Abbott Aerospace March 2017 Newsletter. Click here to Subscribe I rarely engage in public debate on social media platforms. There is usually little point as it is not a good forum to make people change their mind. It usually ends up as a name calling exercise and you end […]

As the owner of a small engineering service company, one of our major costs is software. This represents an investment cost and of course the ongoing cost of that most honorable of all con games – software maintenance fees. This was thrown into sharp relief in the last couple of years as we relocated to […]

Recently I got pulled into some problem solving on a part 23 aircraft program. It is great to suddenly get thrown into a new group of people and try and unravel all of the technical and personal knots. These were a great bunch of engineers and it was a pleasure to spend an afternoon with them. […]

I was privileged to attend the roll-out of the Boom Aero technology demonstrator on Tuesday night in Denver. To give complete disclosure, we had some input early in the program just as Blake was getting started and we did some very preliminary layouts for the production version. In no way can we claim credit for any […]

This is a companion post to the first beam analysis post here.  These methods again reference the excellent  NASA-TM-X-73305 Structures Manual and cover the rest of the cantilever conditions and start on the single span beams: AA-SM-026-009 Free Engineering Spreadsheets: Beam Analysis – Cantilever – Moment at Free End AA-SM-026-010 Free Engineering Spreadsheets: Beam Analysis – Cantilever – […]

Today we exceeded the 10,000 document mark in our technical library. Many thanks and much respect are due to Kenan Stewart for handling all of the library data and Mike Sharpe of Infinet Technologies for creating the website front end and back end. When we launched the revamped website with the technical library Mike asked me how many items would […]

In our office, we have been discussing how to implement effective design cost control and/or monitoring. We have had the good fortune to have worked on many different levels of projects from multi-billion dollar high-performance  jet program to much more humble part 23 prototypes. We have learned the importance of asking the following questions: Why use […]

Again, NACA provides a the solution to another problem. The theoretical derivation of plate compression buckling coefficients. I had a simple derivation, which uses this equation for the simply supported  plate buckling coefficient NACA-Report-733 has the expression that give the general curve for any edge restraint condition: The free spreadsheet is available here and has the simple expression […]

I wrote something initially in this blog post post on this subject. This month I have had discussions with several of our clients regarding the new part 23 regulations. From the reviews we have done the technical content and definition of requirements looks to be either unchanged or improved. However, the change to the public […]

In 2 or 3 months we will have the first draft of our Structures Analysis text book ready to release. We will be sending out advance alpha review copes to everyone on our mailing list.  If you want to join in the review process it will be your chance for you to help us check […]

This is a method that can be used to reduce the apparent high stresses caused by geometric stress concentrations in fine mesh FE models with linear material properties……which is quite a mouthful. In my few years in the analysis trade I have noticed that structures, despite the advances in analysis tools, have not been getting much […]