A look at the IBC's Quality Assurance Program and Masonry from the Small Engineering Firms Prospective

摘要

This paper is written with the intent to give an indication or a "heads up", to the small engineering firm, on some the requirements associated with new International Building Code (IBC) quality assurance programming as related to allowable stress engineered masonry. This paper is not to debate or dispute the requirements of the IBC, nor is it to give a definitive account of the IBC. Currently the Uniform Building Code 1997 edition (UBC) does not formally address quality assurance. This informality lends itself to individual interpretation of the architects, engineers, contractors and building officials. Such individual interpretation has lead to the observation that quality assurance has resulted in a spectrum of final constructed conditions. Conditions that produced severely poor quality masonry construction to masonry constructed as intended by the engineered design. It is the idea of assuring uniformly better construction practices that the new IBC offers a broader scope of quality assurance programming or a formal quality assurance program. This broader scope of the EBC masonry quality assurance program has some implications for the small structural engineering firm. These implications may be small compared the task of providing structural engineering service to a whole project, but they are important and may alter how some engineering firms approach masonry projects. This paper is divided into the following sections, 1. Special inspection as part of the quality assurance program. 2. A comparison of UBC vs IBC the special inspection requirements. 3. A comparison of UBC vs IBC the structural observation requirements. 4. Conclusion It is the goal of this paper is to give the small engineering firm some insight and a higher confidence level when confronting the changes in engineered masonry quality assurance procedure under the IBC when it is the governing code. With this insight the small engineering can reassure and give direction to their clients for code conformance of masonry engineered under the IBC. This paper will only consider allowable stress design engineered masonry.