Design by CAD is "Faultless"

The collapse of a portion of Terminal 2E at Charles de Gaulle airport north of Paris is a tradgedy for those who died and were injured.

Like other spectacular structural faiures -- the Hyatt pedestrian bridge, the Second Narrows Bridge, the Save-on Foods megastore, and others -- structural engineers will pour over details to find out what went wrong, and what must be done to prevent future failures.

(Photo credit: Nicolas Janberg's structurae)

Unlike those earlier examples, CAD was involved in designing this structure that failed. The Guardian Unlimited reports, "Mr Learmount said that since much modern architecture of this kind is computer assisted, the fault was more likely to be 'some imperfection either in the materials used or in the actual carrying out of the design'. A single unnoticed error by one worker could be responsible, he said."

CAD creates designs that lack errors?

Le Petit Journal is quoted as stating, "It is now up to the experts to ascertain whether 'faults in construction or faults in design' are to blame, wrote Thierry Clement. Whatever they decide, however, 'the dramatic accident has had a serious impact on France's technological image'."

The flaw could be either in the design or the construction -- or both. The architect responsible for terminal 2E is François-Paul Andreu, who helped design the original Charles de Gaulle terminal building, as well as airports in Dubai, Hiroshima, Manila, Nice, and elsewhere. Some 400 subcontractors were involved in the construction. No word yet on the CAD system used.

Meanwhile, more cracks are being heard, and the airport authority has promised to demolish the entire e750 million, 11-month-old structure if need be.

Comments

[Patrick EMIN]

It's too early to know what went wrong but my feeling is that CAD has nothing to do with that tragedy. On the contrary, CAD has certainly saved many lives over the years, think about anti-sismic design or bridges design. A catastrophy like the Tacoma Bridge for example would certainly have been avoided if computers and CAD had been used to calculate the wind and vibrations effects. As usual, we will find a human error in the Roissy airport accident and we will find a computer to blame!

[Ali]

The collapse of Terminal 2E at Charles de Gaulle airport has nothing to do with CAD.
I think CAD is a child ant U can't blame a child for something, which needs Adult minds.
What we need to do is playing with Childs and don’t leave them without supervision.
That’s why I think the responsible engineer always is responsible for what he has got from his PC as a result.

[Joshua G. Rizaga]

I am a practising Civil Engineer here in the Philippines mainly involved in detailed engineering and design. Failure at the Charles de Gaulle airport is purely human error maybe at the design or construction phase. Design computations using CAD is the safest,most accurate and more economical. Structural failure in CAD is mainly due to the following human shortcomings:

1. Underestimation by the designer of the actual service loads of the structure.
2. Wrong perception on actual behavior of complicated supports/joints.

If all of these are wrongly feed to the computer in the design process, plus the accumulation of human errors during project implementation, then accidents like this in the near future is inevitable. The computer did not commit any mistake and I will still rely on CAD in my designs.

[decrovid]

GIGO: long-forgotten acronym; Garbage in, Garbage Out.
Management quote (overheard)- "What do you mean, we can't get good CAD people? They only have to hit the right keys, how hard can it be?

How many Bright Young Things know how to properly arrange views so they flow logically on the drawing sheet? Even the difference between First & Third Angle projection- no importance is attached to the basics any more, so fundamental errors are no surprise at all........