Eminent Structural Engineer: Edgar Cardoso

In all projects, he performed scaled model tests to assess the three-dimensional structure behaviour. To do so, he developed instruments to measure and register deformations and displacements, namely contact strain gauges that were pressed against the model, with no need to be glued, enabling their reuse in any section (the electric gauge was glued to a thin rubber, which was glued to an acrylic plate). In 1950, he constructed an “auto-influenciograph” (equipment that could automatically register the influence lines of the response of the structure due to a load that follows a trajectory over the deck and a paper strip that moves in synchrony with the applied load). With such models, he could access the response of high hyperstatic continuous structures that could not be analytically modelled in the 1950s and 1960s.