Steele Liu, P.Eng.

Steele Liu Engineers Inc. was established in July 2018. The practice behind it goes back to 1993.

Steele Liu began his career at the Central Southern Electric Power Design Institute in China, spending nine years on structural design and construction services for more than ten thermal power plants and substations in China and Pakistan. He moved to Ontario in 2002 and worked through progressively senior structural roles at VE Collective, Banerjee Engineers and SNC-Lavalin Mining before joining AMEC in 2007, where he spent eleven years as a senior structural engineer on that firm's larger energy, mining and industrial projects.

Those years produced an unusual range. In the same decade he was checking SAG mill foundations for a fifteen-million-tonne-per-year iron-ore concentrator in Liberia, designing permanent camp foundations on permafrost for De Beers, acting as Owner's engineer on 300 MW wind farms for Enbridge, and detailing autoclave support mats for a nickel refinery in Madagascar.

The firm now applies the same discipline across a broader client base, including a substantial amount of residential and commercial work in the Greater Toronto Area, where a homeowner opening up a kitchen receives the same structured analysis — simply proportioned to the job.

Areas of expertise

• Conventional structural analysis and design — steel, reinforced concrete and wood, for buildings and industrial structures alike.
• Dynamic foundation design — machine and equipment foundations where vibration, rather than gravity, governs the design.
• Structural system optimization — finding the scheme that carries the same loads with less material, fewer pieces and simpler connections.

Teaching

Since 2006, Steele Liu has taught structural design to Canadian codes at a college on weekends, training more than four hundred engineers. Most have been senior practitioners; some were new graduates.

Teaching a code is a different discipline from applying one. It requires knowing not only what a clause says, but why it says it and where it stops being conservative. That is a considerable part of why this office is equally comfortable with a four-billion-dollar mine and a bearing-wall removal.