Divided responsibilities in steel frame design

摘要

It is common practice for consulting engineers to design steel frames but pass on the design of connections to the steel fabricator. Personally I don't like this concept, but I seem to fall into a minority. I am an engineer, but specialise in working solely for fabrication firms either doing complete steel frame designs or just connection designs for frames designed by others. I get a sizeable chunk of my income from doing just the connection designs, so perhaps I shouldn't moan too loudly. The problem I have with this is: where does the responsibility lie? If a frame does collapse, is it because the members were designed incorrectly or because the connections were? Even when a connection fails first, is it because it was designed incorrectly or because the wrong loads were supplied?