SEED Guides Selecting Structural Configuration < >

'If in doubt,
Make it stout,
Out of things you know about.'

That old saying is still the core of good structural design. You can turn the message round to show that the more types of structure you know about, the less you are in doubt about the one to choose and the lighter and more efficient (less stout) your structure can be. This Guide looks at the various factors affecting the design process, then at the ways of narrowing down the options available to help a designer make an appropriate choice of overall structural configuration to meet a particular static structural need. In this case 'static' implies those structures loaded in such a way that they can be considered static. That is, it includes those cases where accelerations vary relatively slowly, exciting no vibrations or dynamic deflection modes, and their effects can be taken into account by appropriate 'load' factors on what is essentially a static pattern.