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The Office of Bridge Design at South Dakota’s Department of Transportation provides design and construction engineering services for more than 1,780 bridges throughout the state. Safety and cost effectiveness are the top priorities of this department, particularly because bridges are designed to last at least 75 years.

Bridge replacement or rehabilitation projects become part of the Department’s 5-year construction program. Once a bridge repair or construction project is approved, engineers are charged with developing plans to meet specifications based on national bridge design standards and the Department’s standard practices. Incorrect calculations could mean a steel beam not able to withstand the necessary load, or a bridge that can’t stand up to the wear and tear of the elements. The South Dakota DOT turned to Mathsoft’s Mathcad program for help with repetitive calculations not handled by the bridge design software.

“Mathcad replaces the Excel spreadsheet that we might have used in the past, to provide a more elegant and better documented design tool,” said John Cole, chief bridge engineer.

Before adopting Mathcad, engineers used a combination of traditional spreadsheets and hand-written calculations for portions of the structure design not completed by the design software.

“We wanted to streamline the long, tedious calculations necessary for bridge design and get people off the spreadsheets they were using,” said Levi Hillmer, transportation project engineer, Office of Bridges and main user of Mathcad. “With Mathcad, you can see the formulas. In addition, it’s easy to personalise the software to meet standard specifications and regulations.”

The accuracy of the hundreds of calculations the department completes each week is closely reviewed in a process that involves the designer and an independent check designer. Using two independent designers, who often use different software programs, greatly minimises the possibility of a design error getting into the plans.

By including formulas and annotations, Hillmer says that he is leaving a road map for future engineers that have to revisit the projects he has worked on.

“I can put in the standard specification, and where it’s located. If somebody has a question about it, they can go back and look where I got it from and see how the formulas were calculated. In ten or fifteen years, when somebody comes back and sees a design, they can immediately go back to the notations.”

This capability is extremely important when reviewing the original calculations for rehabilitation work, or if there is a structural problem. Engineers can go back to Mathcad, look at the original calculations and see what design assumptions were made, or if the standard specifications have changed since construction.

While the main bridge design/analysis software will continue to be dedicated software packages such as OPIS, over time, Mathcad will be used to replace an increasing number of repetitive hand calculations, many of which are still done in pencil.

“One other benefit of Mathcad is for long term records storage,” says Cole. “Printed Mathcad calculations are recorded on microfilm much better than pencil.”

“Mathcad allows engineers to accomplish five days worth of calculations in one day while leaving behind a historical footprint that can be used for bridge repair or maintenance for years to come,” Levi Hillmer, transportation project engineer.

Mathcad is supplied and supported in the UK and Ireland by Adept Scientific plc, Amor Way, Letchworth, Herts. SG6 1ZA;  telephone (01462) 480055, fax (01462) 480213, email mathcad@adeptscience.co.uk; or see Adept’s World Wide Web site  http://www.adeptscience.co.uk/.

With offices in the UK, USA, Germany and throughout the Nordic region, Adept Scientific is one of the world’s leading suppliers of software and hardware products for research, scientific, engineering and technical applications on desktop computers.