Support for Engineers

This section has been prepared to help guide Professional Engineers being asked to certify or "accept with conditions", the results that are generated from specific Pole Line Design software tools. The focus is dedicated to items of an Engineering nature that a P.Eng could be asked to sign-off on potential projects. Topics related to software cost or user productivity are purposely excluded. This is very specific to Pole Line Design and is similar to other more general discussion articles around the use of software by Professional Engineers.

Pole Line Design Software can have an important role to play in the approval of projects by a P.Eng. The engineer could decide to evaluate and/or approve a specific project with complete/partial or no support from any software tool or manual calculations. They can equally decide to use multiple methods and/or tools in order to fulfill their engineering obligations. The options are almost limitless and only bounded by personal preference, access to tools and/or organizational requirements.

The requirements for the final outcome are that the engineering due diligence has been applied to a project appropriately, in a manner that the engineer will support and stamp if necessary. In any event, they are putting their reputation on the line.

In order for an engineer to do this, they must understand or otherwise be comfortable with the results of any tools or processes they utilize, what they address and also what they do not address. It is inappropriate for an engineer to simply rely on software output without sanity checks and understanding the limitations of input data and calculation methodologies. All three aspects are very important. They are also responsible to verify the properties of all materials used in the structural models (pole, guying, soil…), the properties of the wire attachments placing loads on the structure and have an understanding of how all these properties influence the results of the analysis. Ideally a supplier of Pole Line Design Software should assist in some way to make these determinations easy to accomplish, or proactively provide them for an engineer to review. A user manual detailing the strength calculations and loading parameters of the structure would be helpful. As always, ultimate responsibility will rest with the Professional Engineer for the correct use of tools they use.