Seeking Ideas for Impactful Structural Engineering Class Assignments 1

[PYDC402040]

Hello,
I teach upper-level structural engineering classes. I am looking for impactful (and also reasonable for students) assignments, preferably with easy to digest plan sets.

When you think back to your undergraduate days, were there any projects, case studies or HW assignments that were particularly useful?

More specifically, I currently have a class that is Design for Natural Hazards - basically load development using ASCE 7-22. If there was a gap you wish someone had covered in Wind, Snow, Seismic or Live Load Patterning, using the ASCE 7-22 in general, or if you had an assignment that helped ease the school to work transition, I'd love to hear about it. I'm about to introduce them to Mathcad and have them build a sheet for design wind pressures. But while moving on, I had to accept not having a good live load patterning type HW/mini project for them to look at.

Looking for insight and impactful assignment ideas from the practicing community.

Thank you!

 

[ANE91]

Great post. My suggestions:

1. Make them hand-calc everything. I mean everything.

2. Focus on structural behavior and not math. Buy and cut foam into beam and wall shapes, mark it with a pen, and demonstrate Euler-Bernoulli behavior vs Timoshenko behavior.

3. Have them develop factored ultimate loads for several members and connections in the various load paths of a whole metal building. Simple 1-story box with windows and a shallow gable (the slope is important) is sufficient. Incorporate some simple spans and continuous spans. Checking every load case is a must, even if it “doesn’t govern.”

4. Ask them to work out the difference between tributary areas and following-the-load methods.

5. For wind, pay special attention to uplift. For snow, pick one of the various drift configurations (like unbalanced) to be applicable. (Frankly, wind needs its own class, and earthquake needs its own 2 classes, imo.)

6. Ask what loads are to be used for deflection checks (i.e., not strength).

 

[JoshPlumSE]

So, one thing that I think is missing from a lot of structural engineering curriculum is equipment (or cladding) attachment calculations. Tilt up design also seems to be neglected. It's not sexy, but there are a lot of tilt up buildings being built these days.

 

[Tomfh]

Study a nearby small building project. The excavation. The shoring. The substructure. Etc. At the end of semester - do a presentation on it.

Our professor loved ours because the project went bad - the perimeter sheet piling wouldn’t go in all the way. Lots of finger pointing. It was very instructive as to what can happen on projects.

 

[Just Some Nerd]

Understanding how different materials, building shapes, connections, etc. affect seismic behaviour/loading is something that I feel is not well understood in my region (not surprising for those familiar with the Australian industry). Not sure what assessment you'd build around it though to be honest

 

[dold]

I wish someone taught me how to choose/identify the correct procedures to use for the wind/seismic load generation of X building. At my very first job I'm sure I spent untold hours trying to figure out directional procedure and calcing gust effect factors and all sorts of complicated stuff when I should have been using simplified/envelope procedures. Obviously my boss was just sweating me to see what I would do, but it would have been great to be able to walk in and be like "oh, i'll just use X procedure for this".

Ditto for seismic stuff.

 

[TRAK.Structural]

Here are a few ideas:

1. Approximate/back of the napkin methods. A lot of experienced Engineers that I have worked under start things this way to get a project off on the right foot. Things like figuring out how deep a truss should be based on getting reasonable sections to work for T/C chord forces.
2. How structural engineers use a geotech report, and what additional information you can/should ask for. Allowable bearing pressure is relatively straight forward but other things like lateral earth pressures, subgrade modulus and how to adjust it for foundation size, required overcutting, soil pre-conditioning or pre-loading, aggregate piers, etc.
3. Load path, load path, load path! Yes this is fundamental, but sometimes load path is complicated so having a handle on tracking this through a structure is key.

 

[DaveAtkins]

I would have them design a portal frame by hand, a braced frame by hand, and a shear wall by hand. I would also have them do designs by hand in all four major structural materials - concrete, masonry, steel and wood. Have them design a spread footing by hand. And a cantilever retaining wall by hand.

 

[cliff234]

Teach your students how to manually (no computers!) design and detail steel and concrete connections, and then give them some connections to design. My experience is that most new grads are taught very little about connections in school. Many graduate without knowing things as basic as how to design a fillet weld. This is particularly troubling because my observation (over 50 years) has been that most structural failures are connection failures. A W18x35 won't snap in half because it was overstressed in flexure. But the connection at the end of a W18x35 might fail by any one of a number of limit states if the connection was not properly designed.

When young engineers get into the working world they will have to know whether or not the computer gave them the correct design. Knowing how to manually validate what the computer "told" them is essential. Manually designing lots of connections (and members) will help them "calibrate" their brains so they can quickly spot big errors.

 

[milkshakelake]

I agree with everyone here but especially @Tomfh . I felt like my classes were geared to designing giant museums and high rises. It gave me very little feeling for actual stuff. Someone who designs beams for a high rise probably can't actually do it, let alone a small building. I wish I learned more practical stuff that I'd be using every day, like designing joists for a house, or a moment connection for a 4 story building. That stuff is not trivial at all, deceptively difficult, and very useful.

 

[rb1957]

I liked the balsa bridge project.

One way to make it interesting would be to have several failure cases ... load, deflection, seismic (enforced displacement of the supports), etc ... and then have a "wheel of fortune" to decide how to test each specific project.

 

[SWComposites]

I'm in a different industry, but a stress analysis background:
- Hand Calcs! Yes! Its shocking and appalling how too many engineers go straight to a giant FEM, and can't do simple first order sizing by hand
- Load Paths! Its even more shocking when they don't have a clue about load paths and end up designing something with some horrible load path in the structure
- Stability! far too many engineers think a static FEM covers buckling; Nope! stability analysis is an art in itself.

 

[bugbus]

I'll chime in and suggest what I think is missing from recent graduates - perhaps not really related to the specific class you're talking about (Design for Natural Hazards). Unfortunately I think a lot of this cannot be taught in an academic setting, and some people just never seem to develop these things. All of this is really basic stuff (should be anyway).

• As others have already alluded to - the importance of back-of-the-envelope calculations, specifically hand calculations, knowing what is and what isn't a conservative assumption, developing a 'feel' for what works and what doesn't
• Not getting bogged down in minutiae and instead looking at the bigger picture (at first anyway)
• The relationship between stiffness and load paths - it is so fundamental and seems so intuitive but for some people it seems to have eluded their structural design repertoire altogether
• The importance of constructability and developing simple, repeatable details, economics of repetition, etc.
• The significance of ductility (at both a material scale and at a structural level), with regard to load redistribution, robustness, post-yield behaviour, collapse mechanisms, strain limitations
• In the same vein as the above, dispelling the notion that a structure has 'failed' the instant that one small region has reached the elastic limit. Several times I have worked with younger engineers on load-rating type projects where the conclusion was reached that, because one particular beam or area of a slab has begun to yield, the structure has no more capacity - the end result being that the client would need to (unnecessarily) strengthen/load-limit/replace the structure.
• Developing a view that computer software is only to be used to verify what you should already be able to calculate by hand - this one catches out graduates all the time in my experience. They will build some overly complicated computer model with god-knows-what assumptions, and then the results are completely unverifiable. There is no engineering problem that can't be solved (at least to a reasonable degree of accuracy) with just simple hand calculations.
• Nonlinear behaviour of reinforced concrete - tension stiffening, effective stiffness, etc. - more often than not I see younger engineers not even being aware that reinforced concrete cracks, and the implications it has on the distribution of bending throughout a structure.

I could go on and on, but it all boils down to just understanding and drilling into their heads the absolute basics of structural engineering.