ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Allowable stress design

Imagine you are building a sandcastle on the beach. You want your sandcastle to be as strong as possible so it doesn't collapse when the waves hit it. To make your sandcastle strong, you need to make sure the sand is compact and there are no weak spots.

Now, let's pretend you are building a real building instead of a sandcastle. Instead of sand, you are using concrete, steel, and other materials. To make sure your building is strong and safe, you need to follow certain rules and guidelines. One of the rules is called "allowable stress design", which means you can only use a certain amount of stress or force on each part of the building.

Think of it like this - each part of the building, like a beam or a column, has a weight or load that it needs to hold up. If you put too much weight on it, the part may fail and the building could collapse. So, engineers and architects need to carefully calculate how much stress each part of the building can handle and only use materials that can handle that amount of stress.

They also need to take into account things like wind, earthquakes, and other forces that can affect the building and make sure the materials and design can handle those forces too.

So, really, allowable stress design is just a way to make sure buildings are safe and strong by limiting the amount of stress or force placed on each part of the building.