NSF Award
0126373
Engineering - Civil (54)<br/>The projects adapts a series of large-scale experiments into the advanced undergraduate structural engineering courses, and exercises to enhance continuity between graduate and undergraduate courses. Although the literature describes several successful efforts to bring physical experiments into structural engineering courses, the Structural Engineering Workshop is going to advance this methodology in two important ways: First, most previous projects were limited to illustrating structural analysis concepts, but the Structural Engineering Workshop emphasizes failure modes of real structural components and systems. This is important because many design procedures are meant to steer us toward some failure modes and away from others, but it is difficult for students to appreciate why most students never get the chance to see (and hear and touch!) the difference between the brittle failure of an over-reinforced beam and the ductile failure of an under-reinforced beam. Second, while projects reported in the literature were limited in scope to one particular course, the Structural Engineering Workshop is going to use the experiments as a means to integrate activities across a range of courses in an engineering program. <br/><br/>Students of different years and specialties are going to participate in planning and production of test specimens, testing, and analysis of results. Giving students the opportunity to revisit the experiments throughout their academic programs, each time from the shifted viewpoint of a different course, is going to help them understand the critical links between material/component behavior, construction methods, and structural design.
