DEVELOPMENT OF ANDROID BASED APPLICATION FOR THE ANALYSIS & DESIGN OF CONCRETE STRUCTURES

Abstract

This is the age of mobility and versatility; the technological endeavors of man have great implications on daily life affairs of an individual. A person looks for new and advanced systematic tools to accomplish his day to day tasks. Being a civil engineer demands timely completion of tasks to carry out scheduled operations accurately. Concrete being the most durable building material is being widely used all over the world. Manual analyzing and designing of concrete structures require tedious hand calculations and years of expertise thus reducing efficiency. Thus all fingers point towards the desperate need of software packages to analyze and design concrete structure. Structural Design software packages available require laptops and computers to provide suitable hardware configuration to run on. These tools prove audacious to carry in the field and do not provide mobility desired by an engineer of this era. On the other hand the software available for mobile phones are not reliable and comprehensive enough to be used for real world application. ‗Time is money‘, so to achieve efficiency and mobility under the same umbrella, we propose a comprehensive mobile application for the analysis and design of concrete structures. Choosing Android over other mobile phone operating system was imperative taking in to account the current mobile phone market scenario in Pakistan. Android being open source is versatile and is widely used operating system in a larger chunk of low and high budget mobile phones being released nowadays. We aim to develop an android application covering all concrete structural elements that are imperative to building construction. These elements include Beams, Columns, Slabs & Footings. The analysis and design is based on provisions of ACI 318-08 and employ input parameters to be entered by the user to get the results. The special features of this application is the incorporation of two basic system of units being followed all over the world; the International System of units (SI) & the Imperial System. We also verified our results from various text books being incorporated in our course outline Thus, the development of an integrated application for the analysis & design of concrete structures would be a big step forward in the field of civil engineering. It would not only provide mobility & efficiency but will also ensure accuracy reducing the probability of human error.