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warning: this post might bore you, so unless you are really interested in what i’ve been doin for my industrial trainin, do not continue readin.

week 1

how do i begin? i got myself busy with lots of things to learn, but i’ll just proceed to the most time consumin activity that week; orion building design system software (accordin to my supervisor, this software cost rm40k). before you continue, please note that my supervisor is a very nice and patience person who does not put pressure or look down on me and will still find time to teach me although he’s busy.

this software is supposed to be an easy to use and fast designin software, but to me it’s a hell no! it took me 2 days to familiarize myself with its not-so-user-friendly features. (my supervisor has not use this software before, therefore i’m on my own to explore and learn it from scratch!) the headache i went through tryin to figure what parameters to input based on british standard institute codes of practice, and sometimes where to input certain must-have parameters.

after messin around orion for 4 days, i finally completed the 1½ storey shop office design for a project in usj25.

1½ storey shop office ground floor structural design

1½ storey shop office 3d model auto generated by orion

bad luck sure knows when to kick in at the precise moment. my design somewhat failed when runnin the beam analysis. [ w t f ] the software version i use seemed to be a lil buggy as well, as from the model above, the triangular empty section is supposed to be filled up with a blue triangle (indication of a slab).

week 2

it’s disappointin to find out that somethin you’ve put so much effort into didn’t turned out the way you want, but that’s life ain’t it? already accepted that fact, i moved on to manual design guided by my supervisor. this is very, very time consumin, as it is the method practised by civil and structural engineers a long time ago durin those days without computers.

manual design method is very tedious, as i have to design every single non-repeatin slabs, beams, columns, pile caps, decide what rebar size to use etc. any single error in load calculations will result in carry forward errors, as most of them are inter-related. luckily there is a structural analysis and design software (prokon) to help analyse a little on the loadings i input, but most of the calculations, assumptions and decisions were still made by me (with guidance from my supervisor of course). just so you know, this software was used to successfully model the petronas twin towers for exhibition purposes.

my progress with the manual design was very, very slow. the first day, i only completed designin a simple flat upper roof. the next was spent mostly on the water tank floor, located between the upper roof and the roof. i managed to touch a little on the roof garden design, and continued from there the followin day. that followin day was disaster! when i came to one particular beam in the middle of that structure, by all means it fails the manual analysis (due to very high deflection and shearing). no choice, said my supervisor, but i have to re-design the whole structure again with an additional column. damn…