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Muhanned Othman is a structural engineer in Dubai who designs reinforced concrete buildings in ETABS. In this first episode of Agentic Structural Engineer, he shows the agent he built for one of the most tedious loops in his work: the torsion stiffness-modifier iteration.
ACI 318-19 lets you reduce compatibility torsion down to the cracking torsion, φTcr. That keeps beams from getting wider and heavier, and from eating into ceiling height and MEP space. The catch is that it's iterative: assign a stiffness modifier, run ETABS, extract the forces, check Tu against φTcr, adjust the modifier, run again. On a large model a single analysis run can take 30 minutes to an hour.
His agent runs that loop for him. It reads the forces from ETABS, checks every beam against φTcr, reassigns the modifiers, reruns the model and stops when every beam passes, with each iteration logged in an Excel sheet. On the model in the video it took 7 iterations to bring about 40 failing beams down to zero, and the job went from about 1.5 hours to under 15 minutes.
Two things he was clear about. The agent's results match a benchmark model he calculated by hand, which is how he knows the output is code compliant. And the agent does not decide what happens to a beam that still fails after the reduction: resizing it and coordinating with the architect stay with the engineer.
Muhanned built it in my four-week course, where each engineer takes one repetitive workflow from their own projects and builds an agent for it. The October cohort starts Saturday 10 October: four Saturdays, 16:00 to 18:00 Amsterdam time, small group, €399. Details and registration: awatif.co/course. Happy to answer any questions on LinkedIn or by email.