Dr Douglas Brown, Chairman.
The first 10 years of Doug's career was with civil engineering contractors.
Doug has been writing structural engineering programs for the past 40 years and is the author of books on reinforced concrete and structural steelwork. Doug founded Fitzroy in 1972 and has written the bulk of the program code and documentation for the SAND, SCALE, LUCID, SPADE, and NL-STRESS programs. Doug received his Ph.D. from the University of Surrey for developing methods to verify the correctness of structural engineering calculations.
As well as the NL-STRESS structural analysis program, Doug also wrote SuperSTRESS for the Cement & Concrete Association in 1981/82, and upgraded the structural analysis program STRESS-2 to STRESS-3 in 1984. (SuperSTRESS is now marketed by Integer, STRESS-3 was marketed by GTS.)
Doug is a Fellow of the Institution of Structural Engineers and a Fellow of the British Computer Society.
Selected Publications:
- Verifying the correctness of structural engineering calculations (pdf 1,711 KB), DW Brown, PhD thesis, University of Surrey, 2006.
- Recycling Housing, (pdf 4,707 KB) DW Brown, MPhil thesis, University of Nottingham, 2002.
- PRAXIS: A Program for Reproducing Proforma Design Calculations (pdf 241 KB) D Alcock, D Brown, The Computer Journal, Vol 33, No 4.
- A system for invention, (pdf 93 KB) DW Brown JD Brown, The Structural Engineer, Volume 82 Issue 6, March 2004.
- Reinforced Concrete Design Charts for beams and slabs in 30 Grade concrete, DW Brown, Spon 1975. ISBN 0419116001
- Stanchion design charts: safe coincident axial loads and bi-axial bending moments for universal column sections & commonly used universal beam sections of steel grades 43, 50 and 55. DW Brown. Constrado 1974.
Dr Ian Brown, Managing Director.
Ian received his B.A. from Cambridge Univesity Engineering Department in 1990, having been awarded a Townsend Scholarship from St. John's College for achieving a First. Ian received his M.A. in 1994, and received his Ph.D. in 1997 from the Cambridge University Engineering Department Structures Group, for analytical and practical studies into the behaviour of terminations for Kevlar ropes.
Ian worked for Hyder Consulting from 1997 to 2003, in the design, assessment, strengthening, contract preparation and site supervision of long span, cable-stayed and suspension bridges, including Foyle Bridge, Bishop's Bridge Paddington, Avonmouth Bridge, Hungerford Millennium Bridge, Tamar Bridge, Hammersmith Bridge, and Cleddau (Milford Haven) Bridge.
Ian became Managing Director of Fitzroy in 2003, having done some part-time work for Fitzroy prior to this: in the 1980's he created a sprial staircase data generator, and a dot-matrix character set for plotting, in the 1990's Ian wrote the NL-STRESS GUI (Graphical User Interface). Since working for Fitzroy full-time, Ian has converted the NL-STRESS GUI to a 32-bit Windows Application. Ian has also converted the TAPE plot editor, the SCALE printing interface, the Windows interface to the SAND, SCALE, LUCID, SPADE, and NL-STRESS programs, and all other programs in the SAND and SCALE suites to 32-bit Windows Applications. Ian has added print preview and html-help facilites to the suites and added an automatic save to pdf option for each printout. Ian mans the telephone support hot-line.
Recently Ian has developed 3D GUI which provides 3D visualisation of the results of NL-STRESS analyses, which will be released during 2008. The deflections, stresses, bending moments and shear forces are displayed on screen on a scale model of the structure utilising Direct3D, OpenGL or software rendering, as appropriate to the user's PC. Selected plots can then be saved as 3D PDF files to enable viewing the 3D model on any computer using the freely available Adobe Acrobat Reader; a facility is provided to combine PDFs, so multiple 3D PDFs can be joined with regular PDFs containing e.g. a job description, data and results into one large PDF file. These PDFs are useful for providing selected information to clients, checkers or putting on web-pages for marketing purposes.
Ian is a Member of the British Computer Society.
Selected Publications:
- Abrasion and Friction in Parallel-lay Rope Terminations (pdf 2.2MB) IF Brown, PhD Thesis, University of Cambridge, 1997.
- The friction and wear of Kevlar 49 sliding against aluminium at low velocity under high contact pressures (pdf 322 KB) Brown, I.F. and Burgoyne, C.J. (1999), Journal of Wear, 236 (1-2). pp. 315-327. ISSN 0043-1648
Ian produced and entered two posters for the IStructE awards:
- Strengthening of Avonmouth Bridge, (pdf 310KB), project awarded the Institution of Structural Engineers' Structural Achievement Award 2001.
- Strengthening and Widening of Tamar Bridge, (pdf 426KB), project awarded Institution of Structural Engineers' Structural Achievement Award 2003.
James Dunbar
Jim has over 30 years post degree experience in the civil engineering industry. After a varied career working for consulting engineers and local authorities, he became a college lecturer. He has taught structural analysis and the structural design of reinforced concrete, structural steelwork and timber to honours degree level.
Jim has been writing and maintaining programs for the production of structural calculations since 1988. He is currently developing steelwork & reinforced concrete proforma calculations in accordance with the structural Eurocodes.
Professor Michael Horne
The late Michael Horne contributed all the plastic analysis and other non-linear theory to the NL-STRESS program. Michael was the author of more than 60 published books and papers on structural engineering; a Fellow of the Institution of Structural Engineers, Past President and Gold Medal recipient; a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the Royal Society.
Donald Alcock
Donald wrote the NL-STRESS User's Manual and was closely involved in the overall program design. Older engineers will remember Donald as father of the Genesys system. More recently he has become a prolific author with a dozen books including Illustrating Basic which was his first book and sold over 200,000 copies, Illustrating C and Illustrating Fortran; a past fellow of the Institution of Structural Engineers and a past fellow of the British Computer Society.