One of the perks of this deployment is that I get to actually build stuff! This wall is an example of some of the construction I've been doing over the last nine months. Of course, most of my work was at other locations so I travelled quite a bit. Thankfully, that has waned some and a very large project started at my base, so I finally get to monitor a project from the beginning - it is a good feeling!
The wall required a span that went over a small open culvert so the contractor proposed the shown design for a concrete beam on two piers that had to be approved. And, for the first time in my Air Force career I had to go to the drawing board (literally) and calculate the moments of deflection for the wall and the nominal moment capacity of the designed beam. I also had to determine the force per square foot on each of the piers and the transferred force to the ground to determine what possible settling issues we may face.
I can't lie. It was hard! It took me about five hours to determine everything, going back to Civil Engineering handbooks and the web for equations, coefficients, and standards. But it was actually fun, too. Who said those five years at Tech were a complete waste?
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