Jeremy Atkinson

Jeremy Atkinson

Structural Engineer

Biography

I’m a structural engineer. I live in Vancouver, BC. I try to prevent structures from collapsing in earthquakes. I use tools like finite element and nonlinear analysis to make it happen.

Previously I was a graduate student at UBC where I worked on topics such as the seismic performance of tall buildings, effect of vertical ground motions on structures, nonlinear modelling of diagonally-reinforced coupling beams, seismic assessment of non-structural components, and seismic design of outrigger systems.

When I’m not scheming, analyzing or designing structures, I’m writing software to help accomplish those things. To that end, I work on plugins for some common structural analysis software, in-house data processing tools, and miscellanous other projects.

Interests

  • Structural Analysis
  • Earthquake Engineering
  • Concrete Design
  • Steel Design
  • Computer Programming

Education

  • MASc in Structural Engineering, 2017

    University of British Columbia

  • BASc in Civil Engineering, 2013

    University of British Columbia

Recent Posts

A short post on using lambdas in excel

Excel recently released a new feature called a lambda function, which can help keep embedded formulas much tider and easier to read

What is Performance-Based Design?

A brief comparison of traditional and performance-based design.

Modelling overlapping slabs with variable loads in ETABS

A quick discussion and verification of load calculation when modelling overlapping shells in ETABS

Debugging ETABS plugins in Visual Studio

A few points about debugging a C# etabs plugin in Visual Studio.

Building code height limit

The familiar 160 foot height limit appearing in ASCE 7 has no scientific backing.

Projects

Here’s a few things I’ve worked on

Calcs.app

A no-frills website with useful structural engineering calculations

A starter kit for using the CSI OAPI with ETABS or SAP2000

A starter kit for writing a plugin to extend the functionality of ETABS or SAP2000.

Hugo Themes

Hugo is a popular static site generator written in go, that happens to be used for my website. I’ve written two themes for hugo, which are available at my github repos linked herein.

SDOF Response

One of my first web development projects was to create a single-degree-of-freedom analysis tool. I wanted to learn some basic web development skills, and chose to use AngularJS and Foundation framework. The code and demo is available in my github repository

Characterization of Vancouver’s Tall Buildings

The purpose of this study was to characterize a typical newly-constructed tall building in Vancouver, and assess the seismic performance of such a structure. We conducted a detailed review of new buildings in the downtown region which were constructed after 2005 and had a height greater than 100 meters.

Etabs Post-processing tool

I created a tool to extract data from ETABS analysis software and process it into design spreadsheets, saving countless hours of manual data manipulation.

Publications

Seismic design of outrigger systems using equivalent energy design procedure

An outrigger system is an effective structural scheme that is commonly used in high‐rise construction to increase the stiffness of …

Seismic design of outrigger systems for tall buildings

Outrigger systems are an effective structural scheme that is commonly used in high-rise construction to increase stiffness and …

Detailed Seismic Performance Assessment of High-value Contents Laboratory Facility

Recent earthquakes worldwide have shown that even countries with well-established building codes are still vulnerable to economic and …

Seismic performance evaluation of typical new tall buildings constructed in Vancouver Canada

With growing population and limited space in major cities worldwide, high-rise construction is becoming the only solution in solving …

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