 Welcome to this episode of the Structural Engineering Channel podcast. A podcast focused on helping structural engineering professionals stay up-to-date on technical trends in the field and also help them to succeed in their careers and lives. I'm your co-host Alexis Clark. I work in Hilti's North American headquarters as the product manager of our chemical anchoring portfolio in the U.S. and Canada. I'm a licensed professional engineer in Texas and I graduated with a degree in civil engineering from UT Austin. I'm your co-host Matt Bacartal. I'm a licensed engineer at DCI Engineers, practicing on structural projects in California with an undergraduate degree from Cal Poly Pomona and a master's degree in structural engineering from UC San Diego. In this episode, we talk to Mostafa Alamoghi, an active researcher, passionate instructor, and highly talented structural engineer about high-rise structural design. Mostafa will also talk about the structural engineering profession and provide some great tips for aspiring structural engineers. Our sponsor for today's program is Giza Steel, a design software specifically created for structural steel connection design. Giza supports over 400 connection configurations in the sheer, moment, vertical, and horizontal bracing groups. Selected as an AISC Modern Steel Construction Hot Product for the past two years, Giza continues to expand its connection library and add new tools that help users spend less time on connection design and produce concise and thorough design reports. You can try Giza today for free by going to www.gizasteel.com and downloading the 15-day trial. Giza, created by steel design professionals for steel designers. Again, that's www.gizasteel.com. Now, let's jump into our conversation with Mostafa. Mostafa, welcome to the Structural Engineering Channel podcast. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Before we dig into the meet of today's interview, can you share with us a little more detail of what you do currently in your role at Structural Engineering Basics? Yes, absolutely. Structural Engineering Basics is an online platform. I co-founded it with Noa Moskovich. It's basically a platform to help people understand the basics of structural engineering without getting into too much equations or long formulas or anything. We basically created it because we found a need for people that work with structures in the industry that wanted to understand the basics and be able to lead their teams or hire a structure engineering team and communicate efficiently with them. Even students found it interesting to learn more about the profession and what structure engineering is like. This is a program we're really excited about. If your listeners are interested, I created a discount coupon. If you want to check out our website, we can talk about this later. Awesome. I know you do have a really cool career path. Could you go into that? How did you get into structural engineering and what got you interested in structural engineering? Absolutely. I'm originally from Egypt. I grew up in Cairo and this is where I did my undergrad. I was genuinely interested in buildings and structures and wanted to know how they're made. I think also a big part of it was my father. He's a structure engineer. I thought that's an interesting thing to study. I didn't know much about what structure engineers do, but then I realized for tall buildings it was structure engineers that did all the number crunching and design. I did my undergrad in Egypt and shortly after graduating, I got an opportunity to work in Dubai. I was very fortunate to get this experience because in a way it shaped my career. It was there I was exposed to the design of tall buildings. Dubai, they have now the tallest building in the world. That was an excellent opportunity for me to learn what goes into the consulting side and design of tall buildings. Then I moved back to Egypt to do my masters and eventually decided to move to Canada to do a PhD in structural engineering. Eventually, I got my professional engineering PN designation and practiced engineering consulting and also taught engineering at university. Looking back, I got an opportunity to do lots of things in the structural engineering profession. That's really impressive. I love that you have such a really nice well-rounded background where you did a little bit. You've been to different countries so you understand the differences and some of the nuances that happen not only with structural engineering practice but culture. If any of our listeners are tuning in, that is a great follow-up and a great opportunity for us to learn a little bit more about some of what Anne was telling us in our last episode using the Global Practice Guide. It's great to have you on. That's a great follow-up. I think it's so fantastic you went back to school. I know a lot of people, especially young engineers, are always juggling with this opportunity of, you know, do I want to go back for a master's? Do I want to go back for a PhD? What is the value there? Why do I want to pursue that? How is it going to help get me to the next spot? Is that another investment that is going to pay off like my undergraduate degree was? Why don't you choose to go back to school? That's a great question because I remember by the end of my undergraduate program, you know how engineering and structural engineering courses, they're very heavy and by the end of it, I was exhausted. I thought, okay, that's it for school. I don't want to go back to school. I started working so I got this opportunity to go work in Dubai and then I realized what structural engineers actually do and especially on the consulting side, like the design and the huge responsibility like the designer has and I thought, wow, you know what? Going back to school and getting more and more courses and more theory and focusing on the things that I realized I'm genuinely interested in practicing in the profession, so that was my way to master's degree. I would say if you're interested in being a consultant, doing design work, a master's degree would be an excellent way to get more technical experience and strengthen your background in engineering design. The PhD decision for me, it was a whole bunch of things at the same time because I was working in Egypt and then this opportunity came to move to a new country, a new culture, I had to learn the language, eventually practice engineering in a different country so I had to learn the design codes and a whole bunch of things and the PhD fit nicely in the work I already did in my master's. So for me it was like an excellent step to start the profession in the new country and I was fortunate, it helped me in many ways. I got a chance to publish the research work I worked on with the research team at university in peer reviewed journals and international conferences so that helped me with like my technical writing skills, obviously helping with like teaching engineering later on and even with the professional engineering. Just like in terms of getting the license, the designation, the time I spent working on my research counted as experience because my advisor is a PN, just a professional engineer so we counted as working under the supervision of the professional engineer. So I guess it depends, for each case you'll have to weigh the benefits and what you're going to get out of it because at the same time you don't want to waste time and go do a degree that you're not necessarily going to use but at the same time if you can tap into the benefits of like going back to school and getting more education you will set yourself definitely ahead of the competition. Absolutely. Just so that we can all understand a little bit more you keep mentioning PN which I understand is the professional engineering license of Canada. Can you explain to us and our listeners kind of what the process is to get a PN so that we can understand how it compares in relation to the professional engineering licensure path? Yes, absolutely. So I guess this is the equivalent of the PE in the United States. Right, so the PN in Canada so each province, each part of Canada it has its own association that regulates the practice of professional engineering and they list a set of requirements so it starts with like a degree in engineering so a bachelor degree or something like that and there is usually a committee that will assess the academic qualification and if you're qualified then there is the next step would be like an exam like it doesn't focus on the technical stuff it's more like the ethics and the practice of engineering ethics it's sort of like a pass or fail exam and before that there is a four year time of like practicing engineering as a member in training during this time you should work under supervision of a professional engineer and submit like a regular report that outlines your experience what are the tasks you worked on and your advisor or supervisor typically will sign or like will help in writing the reports and have some sort of role there and by the end of it you do the pass or fail exam and the last step is like three reference letters by the time you get the three letters you send it to the association and you hear back and say well congratulations you're ready to get your full engineering license designation That's awesome I'm glad to know and I appreciate you spending the time to kind of share the process with us I know that's not the main topic of today's presentation or episode but I do think it's good for our audience to have a little bit of understanding of what are some of the licensure and some of the qualifications even other nations as our world continues to become more global and the opportunities to work abroad become more expansive I know there's plenty of listeners who are thinking hmm I could totally go do some time in Canada I know I could so Yeah it's always good to know what's going on and what the licensure is up in Canada or in other countries too Mostafa what are some of the most unique projects that you've worked on since I know you've worked on a lot so yeah what are the things that pop out to you? Yes, yes interesting so one of those definitely has to be a tall building I was fortunate to be part of the design team in Saudi Arabia it's one of the top 10 tallest buildings in the world it's famous for this massive clock on top of the tallest tower it's huge it's like 120 floors that's like about 600 meters that's like I'm thinking in feet that would be I think in metric so that's like almost 2,000 feet so that was a very interesting project and what goes into the design, the analysis obviously for something that tall we needed wind tunnel testing and just like the sheer magnitude of the project the project was built where a massive hill used to be and there was like a huge amount of demolition to remove that hill to build a project so the final cost it was like billions of dollars that was a very interesting project another project that's most recently a tall project in Winnipeg Manitoba this is the Hori structure it was built on existing foundations the original kind of phase one was already built and then the new tower was supposed to come and sit on those existing foundations and that gave me an opportunity to work with consultants from different parts in Canada the wind tunnel analysis and design we did it with a consultant in Toronto and just to coordinate and work with the architects the electrical, mechanical engineers and answer the tough questions like how many floors can we get out of the existing foundations and get a design that can work structurally and with the architect as well coordinating this is challenging because when you want to go taller you want more walls and thicker walls and the architect wants their doors and openings and windows so it was very interesting to work in all these things wow could you go into more you mentioned the wind tunnel testing I imagine that's one of the governing things that govern the design on these high-rises could you go into a little more about that and what the procedure is for that since I'm not too familiar with the wind tunnel testing so that would be something really interesting that you can go into absolutely so when buildings get taller the standard code kind of and design standards wind load and equations to calculate the wind pressure on the building become sensitive to the dynamic properties of the structure the natural frequency so think of the tower the building as like basically a cantilever which is like an inverted kind of pendulum kind of thing and the time it takes for the tower when it vibrates to do a full cycle this is this depends on like the dynamic natural dynamic properties of the building so the taller it gets the wind dynamic effect becomes part of the effect on the load on the wind pressure so some design standards limit the trigger to go to experimental testing that's what wind tunnel is like it's an experiment consultants that work with wind tunnel testing they would actually build a 3D model of the tower with surrounding buildings to create a similar environment to what the actual building is going to be built in and test it in a big wind tunnel like to see the effect on wind speeds and they would put all sorts of sensors to gauge because of the shape of the building if there's going to be some like turbulence or some sort of like forces and they can record all that the consultant we work with on this project they did an excellent job in creating what they call a desktop study so that helped us to get things going this is like using software model the tower we're trying to build and use from previous experience from projects they've worked on what usually the forces look like and I created a 3D model for the tower and gave them the the stiffness and the natural frequency and the dynamic properties of the structure and they were able to give me some sort of like something to get because you will realize soon after you get the forces that there are certain criteria or certain things are not working like for example the lateral deformation is too high or some sort of like vibration effect is not where it's supposed to be so I start increasing the thickness of walls adding new walls adding out rigors increase the stiffness of the material like for example use higher strength concrete or something like that to get things to work but just by the nature of changing these things I change the properties of the building now so the fundamental frequency is different so I take that second iteration and go back to the wind tunnel consultant and then do few iterations like that till we figure things out so the way they provided the loads for me was point loads at each level in terms of force in the x direction kind of horizontal force in the 90 degree direction kind of y direction and torsion and the specific combinations to work that with so it ended up being like I don't know 24 load cases with like the combination of all wind loads to make sure that they cover all cases that the wind will impact the tower and also provided some very useful graphs if I did some minor changes and change the frequency or the stiffness of the building I can go back and change the forces accordingly so it was a very good cooperation to figure out how to design that tower building that's awesome I first want to thank you for kind of walking us through the process of the iterative design process I do a lot of work with helping high schoolers become introduced to engineering and I work with this one teacher who's really good about really immersing his students in the iterative engineering design process because you don't just design something once you go through it over and over and over and you change something and you test it again and I don't think they believe us sometimes they're like no you just like us to do this over and over again you just want to torture us so it's good for a professional to be able to share that so I'm going to make a shout out ODY at high school and Mr. Kassal's engineering class this is a real thing I promise it is, absolutely it is, it absolutely is I know Matt could speak about all the time but it's good to have a guest kind of walk us through that process as well of course, of course I think that is so fascinating thank you for sharing with us about the wind tunnel testing and it seems like such a complex system I'm curious, obviously you go back and forth and you have to change different attributes for the building but what are some of the outcomes in this in the actual building design what are some of the lateral systems that you would use maybe what are some of the software that you would use to analyze this and what are some of the construction materials you consider in different situations beautiful, so that's like following up on what you just said this is the nature of design especially for tall buildings is that when you change the assumptions the kind of the results change and then you go and change the assumptions again and then you'll get different results so you want to start with so the idea is like okay we want the structure to be safe and we also want to not over designing we don't want to kind of over build it so where do we start so I usually start with some reinforced concrete shear walls and cores usually around the stairwells and the elevator shafts so most of the time architecturally these are just like dead walls just to encase the stairwell or to enclose the elevators and those are perfect opportunities for the structure engineer to just like use their put their solid reinforced concrete shear walls there so if you start there and then you run the analysis maybe you do the wind tunnel thing you assign the loads and then you look at the results so there are certain things that you want to check first is the design going to be safe are the stresses in these walls within the allowable range or like the walls are just like they're stressed and there is no physical way they can withstand all that load and pressure so even if it's safe and you can the walls are good with the stress you need to look at the deformation of the building because you don't want someone living at the top floor when it's really windy outside to kind of feel that massive movement of the tower that becomes really uncomfortable so you want to check the deformation and the lateral movement as well and this becomes like a function of the stiffness of the building and the really the way you can control this is by either adding more walls or another thing I would do is connect groups of shear walls or cores together so I would connect the elevator to stairwell with like coupling beams to create like a bigger stiffer tube sort of thing to increase the inertia and the stiffness of it and then run the analysis again if that was sufficient to satisfy all the terms you might as well like go ahead with like more detailed design and coordination and let everyone know hey these are the layouts that work so everyone can start working on their part of the design if not then you will start to try to engage the perimeter of the building so now we are talking about very super tall buildings so this is where ideas like exoskeleton would come into play you are engaging the full footprint like the perimeter of the tower to create like a very stiff element and connected with the inner reinforced concrete core so it can all work together to increase that stiffness and inertia and go higher pretty much so a few of the material I've used in something like that would be so reinforced concrete for stairwell works great because it creates that big solid walls with big inertia and stiffness those work very well also steel steel columns, steel beams they work very well in the typical floors for like a steel column it can go up to 40 I've used them for 40 floors by the time you get to the basement if you can find a thick enough steel column to support the load you might want to go to concrete reinforced concrete or even a composite section so it's basically a steel column caged with concrete to resist the loads and the stresses for the typical floor I've used holocore slabs they are precast pre-stressed also post tension reinforced concrete work very well especially with tall buildings and the typical repetitive floors because you can use thicker, thinner rather slabs so you can save on the weight and you can save on the foundation columns and things like that so yeah those were some of the materials that I've used I think that's what's really cool about tall buildings or even super tall buildings I know when I'm looking at some of the design concepts of some of these super tall buildings they're really cool how they combine you know there's the strong core but then like you mentioned they might have outriggers or an exoskeleton kind of like those unique buildings where it really allows you to get creative on I imagine with all the wind tunnel testing they must be going through different types of shapes and so I think a lot of creativity can go into it and I think that's what's really cool about those types for our listeners Mostafa I want to give them some professional advice do you have any advice for them let's say they do want to get into high-rises is there a specific career path that they should go should they look for a specific type of company or should they get a specific type of experience do you have any advice for those types of people absolutely so you first step I would say you need to kind of look inside those buildings and knowing how things work interest you because if you're going to pick this as a profession you're going to be working a lot you're going to be spending long hours in this like process of like designing and changing things so it really helps if you genuinely interest and it excites you to start a new project and see how you're going to figure out and design it so you want you're interested and you want to go into this career path a civil engineering degree would help so that's that's cool you might want to pick the civil engineering path and within your program you start looking at what courses interest you and you might as well pick the ones that will enable you to take your career into the structure of engineering so structure engineering design you might want to take like some of the analysis courses materials structures dynamics things like that and I would also say try to get experience as early as possible so like you know first year second year in try to network and communicate with your colleagues your professors and look for like what's out there and see how you feel about it if there are a certain path or a certain career that interests you and try to learn more and see ask the question like approach it with like you know open curious like hey I'm interested I'm curious about what you guys do how do I get there how do I do this can you learn me can you teach me something things like that so those would be few of the things that would strongly recommend doing as as early as possible there is no like the best time to start preparing for your career is right now fantastic and universal words of wisdom I love those thank you what are some of the best steps now that you've done a really good job setting up what an undergraduate can do what are some of the best steps that a recent structural engineering graduate can take to further their career especially when it comes to high rises yes right so so it depends on where you start so like you just finished and you're looking for your perfect job start your perfect career or even if you started your work and you realize that it's a possibility that you're going to be working on tall buildings so I think networking goes a long way so you most probably the fundamentals and the basics you got that covered in your program like a bachelor's degree so now it's going to be communicating with professionals that are ahead of you and you might want to like look for mentors someone that has the experience of working on tall buildings and ask questions and you know and you might think well you know absolutely it is the case that you know professionals and engineers are super busy and you might think oh I don't want to bother anyone but for me I love it when like a fellow engineer or student approached me to ask about something because it's very rewarding to share back and give back you know things that I've learned and see others kind of using it and reaping the benefits of it so I would recommend looking for a mentor I would recommend paying attention and keeping an eye open for opportunities so next time there is like a work or project in the office and they're looking for someone to work on I don't know maybe raise your hands and hey I'm interested in tall buildings let me give it a try and in terms of like the technical part I use softwares a lot there are like a lot of finite element analysis softwares out there and I have so much respect for like engineers back in the day before computers how did they do the analysis of these tall buildings it's crazy like think of this iterative process can you imagine calculating the dynamic properties of a tall building over and over again by hand by hand exactly so it's definitely something that you will benefit from adding it to like toolkit look for I can name a few of the softwares that I found very helpful I use eTabs a lot I find it oriented to multi-story buildings and in terms of learning as I said you can ask someone you can look for a mentor or you can Google it YouTube has a lot of information like we take you step by step and then in a week you're good to go and use the tools so that's what I would say like just like raise your hand and summon up the courage and take the responsibility and then you'll figure it out along the way I love that taking some self initiative gets you a long way absolutely I know that actually Matt and I hosted an episode regarding mentorship at the beginning of January maybe and we had quite a bit of information I'm glad we actually spent time talking about exactly what you just shared with us Mustafa which is there are actually lots of people who are busy out there who are more than happy to pass along wisdom and give advice and be a mentor so if you have someone in mind that you want to mentor you reach out to them and just ask because they can't help if they don't know that you want help and Matt I kind of just want to make a little plug for you here since Mustafa gave us a great like up to say that you know there's a lot of reviews available on the internet like YouTube yeah thanks yeah I got you know the whole channel thing too it's and it's a great way to share experience with the internet you know like yeah there's mentorship one on one but there's also a lot of opportunities on social media to share your knowledge especially if you're in whatever technical stuff you do a lot of people do you just they just want to learn about it especially the students especially when they're growing up they kind of see like these cool projects that you're working on it's a great way to mentor but also to help the structural engineering profession to you know attracting talent yeah yeah Matt's killing it oh so sorry go ahead I think we're living in very interesting time with like you know YouTube and podcast like I love what you guys are doing I think like paving the way for like engineers to kind of communicate together and maybe go out of the office a little bit and do something other than crunching numbers and sharing experience and sharing knowledge absolutely glad we have all these channels of communication we can use them for good yes so I want to really quickly circle back before we close today's episode I want to circle back to something you mentioned at the very beginning of the podcast which was this structural engineering basics that you've developed why did you decide to start this as an online course I so as I mentioned I co-founded it with Noa Moskovich we used to work together at the same consulting firm and we actually had like cubicles right next to each other and during work we would get a lot of questions from our clients about something that would be like covered under like the very basics of structural engineering so we thought hey like there is a need out there for the professionals and the people that work with structural engineering because structures affect our lives on a daily basis right so it's there is a lot of need to understand the basics without getting into like the number crunching the very kind of complex formulas and things like that and we were lucky to have very successful stories for people that took our course there was a project manager in Japan actually he's responsible for like developing multiple buildings and he was leading a big structural engineering team and contractors and realized hey I'm leading everyone I should get like an idea about the basics what goes into structural engineering and building structures also a contractor actually used our course to train his staff so they're ready to do like structural engineering related work so we're very happy to see like the success stories and how there is a need for this information out there so I mentioned at the beginning that if your listeners are interested I created a coupon for them if they want to check out our website so our website is structuralengineeringbasics.com and we have lots of free content we have like blogs we have a YouTube channel we talk about different topics and there is also a free introduction course that gives you a sample of what's in the full structural engineering basic course so you can sign up and you can also download a free guide we call the ultimate guide for structural engineering basics it kind of nicely summarize the important things that you need to know about structural engineering so if you're interested in the course I created a coupon code you can use that code to get a 10% discount and the code is S-E-C 10 off so that's the structural engineering channel S-E-C 10-O-F-F all capital we're happy to hear from you if you have any questions be more than happy to get in touch and answer your questions awesome thanks for that Mustafa we'll definitely link that in the description or you've already said the channels how can our listeners connect with you do you have a LinkedIn or some way they can connect with you one-on-one yes absolutely so the easiest way would be our website all the links and everything we're also on Facebook Instagram on LinkedIn so as I mentioned the website is structuralengineeringbasics.com and an email to reach out info at structuralengineeringbasics.com and just check out our website see if any of this interest to you we also recently created a course for students or recently graduated engineers that talks about a lot of the things we discussed today how to get prepared for the job you really want we're very excited about this whole thing so yeah absolutely I'm excited and looking forward to hearing from everyone that's fantastic Mustafa thank you so much for coming on and sharing some of your really great insights with us I know you've given us some really good information and our listeners some great resources to check out that's really going to help them advance in their understanding of structural engineering and in their careers thank you my pleasure that was a really awesome experience thanks for having me we hope you enjoyed the episode today we would love to hear your feedback comments and or questions to leave them please visit structuralengineeringchannel.com there you'll find a summary of the key points discussed in today's episode as well as links to any of the resources websites or books mentioned don't forget to subscribe on apple podcast or wherever you listen to your podcast until next time we wish you the best in all of your structural engineering and ethics