NEWS FROM THE USA
INDUSTRY NEWS TRENDS
NEWS FROM THE USA
A family journey through steel
By Amanuel Gebremeskel, The‘ roving engineer’
I have been doing a great deal of travelling over the past six months. One of my objectives has been to study how steel has been used over time and space in various modes of transportation. I’ m certainly not the first person in my family to be obsessed with steel and travel.
My grandfather, pictured here in the early 40s with his steel clad Fiat 508 Balilla, spent much of his years setting up a regional transportation network, primarily to move steel around.
Since his time the car remains an important means of travel. The picture below is of an elaborate stainless steel framed Audi exhibit at a recent Las Vegas convention that I attended. The main distinction now is that most all of the cars on show did not require drivers. Had he been alive to witness this grandpa would be floored!
All of these driverless cars are bound to revolutionise the world in yet unforeseen ways. Not only will steel be used to frame the cars but also their housing, bridges, and ports if one day they levitate to avoid traffic. It so happens that my own role at the Institute will be to provide easy-to-use design standards and solvers – such as the SAISC eToolkit – to allow designers and engineers to freely imagine and implement novel ways of travel.
We live in a thoroughly globalised world. At times this can be frightening and at other times totally exhilarating. In many ways lifestyles around the world have converged and without doubt one of these is the way in which we use steel to facilitate travel in general.
My grandfather’ s daughter, my own mother, continued the legacy of promoting the next generation of travel and spent three decades of her life helping to build a successful airline. As a child, travelling through airports was a familiar scene to me. However the one major change that I have witnessed in my life involves the evolution of the framing system for most airports from concrete to steel.
The magnificent use of structural steel to frame the O. R. Tambo International Airport is but one example of this incredible migration to steel to house airline passengers.
Steel Construction Vol. 40 No. 1 2016 11