Week 2

I need to think of more exciting blog titles…

The second week definitely felt easier than the first, as I got into more of a routine. I spent a lot of the week working with Shakira on bearing capacity calculations. She is working on the design of shallow foundations for a school development in Ruhehe, in the north of Rwanda. The school buildings themselves are relatively straightforward, being single storey reinforced concrete frames. But things are complicated by the architects’ vision, which involves constructing a 5 m high freestanding wall as a visual feature when approaching the site. This site is in Rwanda’s volcanic region and lots of construction in the area is done with locally available volcanic stone. The architects want to use this for their wall. Being a seismic area, we also have to design for earthquake loading, which means that the foundations for this wall are quite tricky to design.

Shakira has around 1 year’s experience with MASS, and has done quite a bit of site supervision as well as getting introduced to structural engineering and seismic design by Rosie. Her degree course didn’t cover any geotechnical engineering or soil mechanics, so we had to start from scratch. For me it was a really useful exercise to see what existing knowledge she has and how best to build on that to improve her understanding. By the end of the week, Shakira had produced hand calculations to size the pad foundations, and she’s now working on a spreadsheet to carry out the calculations for her in future. It was great to see her gain confidence in her abilities.