NORTH CAROLINA ENGINEER

McGee Engineering, PLLC is a North Carolina based structural engineering firm specializing in commercial and residential construction. As a North Carolina public engineer, McGee Engineering puts safety first in all of its engineering services. The safe design of structures requires a design approach which takes account of the statistical likelihood of the failure of the structure. Structural design codes are based upon the assumption that both the loads and the material strengths vary with a normal distribution.

Our job at McGee Engineering as a North Carolina structural engineer is to ensure that the chance of overlap between the distribution of loads on a structure and the distribution of material strength of a structure is acceptably small (it is impossible to reduce that chance to zero).

It is normal to apply a partial safety factor to the loads and to the material strengths, to design using 95th percentiles (two standard deviations from the mean). The safety factor applied to the load will typically ensure that in 95% of times the actual load will be smaller than the design load, while the factor applied to the strength ensures that 95% of times the actual strength will be higher than the design strength.

The safety factors for material strength vary depending on the material and the use it is being put to and on the design codes applicable in the country or region. We at McGee Engineering, PLLC strive to place safety first in all of our designs and so that our clients can rest assured that even the smallest detail has been attended to in all of our structural engineering projects.