Hardy Cross

Hardy Cross, 1885-1959, born in Nansemond County, Virginia.

BS in civil engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1908, and then joined the bridge department of the Missouri Pacific Railroad in St. Louis, where he remained for a year, after which he returned to Norfolk Academy in 1909. After a year of graduate study at Harvard he was awarded the MCE degree in 1911. He next became an assistant professor of civil engineering at Brown University, where he taught for seven years. After a brief return to general engineering practice, he accepted a position as professor of structural engineering at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, in 1921.

He was the developer of the "moment distribution method" and one of the USA's most brilliant engineers. Accurate structural analysis of large reinforced concrete building frames in the 1950s was a formidable task. It is a tribute to the engineering profession, and to Hardy Cross, that there were so few failures. When architects and engineers had to compute the stresses and deflections in a statically indeterminate frame, they inevitably turned to what was generally known as the "moment distribution" or "Hardy Cross" method. In the moment distribution method, the fixed-end moments in the framing members are gradually distributed to adjacent members in a number of steps such that the system eventually reaches its natural equilibrium configuration.

Moment Distribution programs (http://www.freesoftware.com.my) are seldom created nowadays. Today's structural analysis software are based on the Stiffness Method / Finite Element Methods.

Although the Cross method has been superseded by more powerful procedures such as the finite element method, the "moment distribution method" made possible the efficient and safe design of many reinforced concrete buildings during an entire generation.

Another Hardy Cross method is also famous for modeling flows in complex pipe networks. Until recent decades, it was the most common method for solving such problems.

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