In Engineering, What is a Megastructure?

The discipline of structural engineering is a discipline that studies common structural selection, mechanical analysis, design theory, and construction technology and management in civil engineering.

Structural engineering

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All kinds of buildings, structures and engineering facilities are component assemblies constructed with appropriate engineering materials under certain environmental and economic conditions. Within the specified period of use, they must safely withstand various external and internal effects (including disasters such as earthquakes), and meet the use functions of the project. Structural engineering disciplines have a strong social, theoretical, and practical nature, a multidisciplinary comprehensiveness, and advanced technology, safety, reliability, and economic unity. In recent decades, due to the research results of materials science, computer science and other basic disciplines, conditions have been created for the renewal and development of structural engineering disciplines. The entire structural engineering discipline has undergone profound changes from its basic composition to its research connotation. At present, large-span buildings and bridges, high-rise and towering structures, special and heavy structures, spaces and underground structures continue to emerge, and new materials, new structures, new processes, and new technologies (including intelligent technologies) are increasingly progressing, driving structural engineering. Development of theory and technology. Structural analysis requires the transformation from a single component to the overall structure, from plane analysis to space analysis, from static analysis to dynamic analysis, from linear analysis to nonlinear analysis, from individual state analysis to full-process analysis; in structural design , The requirements extend to consider the entire process of comprehensive decision-making including construction, use and maintenance.

The traditional analysis method of structural engineering is to use the coordinate axis to simplify various tensor numerical equations (such as internal forces and displacements) to obtain the internal forces and displacements of structural members (such as beams and columns). After the advent of computers, new analysis methods such as finite element method and nonlinear analysis method have been widely used to solve various types of more complex structural problems (such as the coordinated work of materials with different properties, etc.).