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CANDE
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Applications and Usage
Use of CANDE by Engineering Community

 

CANDE's user community range from culvert designers to university researchers in soil-structure interaction. Specifically, CANDE is commonly used by state DOT bridge engineers, design consultants, manufacturers and suppliers, and university investigators.  Typical applications of  the user groups are listed below. CANDE meets the needs of all user groups. 

 

  • State DOT designers and their consultants use CANDE when confronted with designing large or specialized culvert installations. CANDE allows engineers  to smartly choose without bias among alternative designs and materials such as a reinforced concrete arch versus a corrugated metal long span.

 

  • Culvert suppliers and manufacturers use CANDE to design their products for both routine and specialized installations as well as for investigating new innovations and product improvements.  Some suppliers provide a CANDE analysis on every culvert installation they sell.

 

  • University researchers use CANDE  to interpret experimental test data and to extend the knowledge base in soil-structure interaction. Moreover, CANDE serves as a test bed to evaluate new modeling theories within the program such as new soil models and/or structure models .

 

The popularity of CANDE is largely due to the rigorous adherence to good mechanics and to the trustworthiness of the program, earned over 46 years of testing and improvement. Equally important to CANDE’s popularity is that, unlike most commercial software, CANDE is available with its source coding language and documentation of the programming structure and theory. From the beginning, CANDE’s programming architecture was designed with the forethought that future additions and modifications would always continue. Accessibility to the source program is an extremely important feature for researchers who often want to test new theories and models as part of their research program.