Modern Structures

Catalog description

A hands-on introduction to structural engineering, combining classroom demonstrations and presentations with laboratory experience. Students predict hurricane wind forces and design key elements in a high-rise building to resist those forces. Students design a residential wood-deck based on laboratory tests to stretch, compress, shear, split, and bend wooden specimens. Students build brick walls and fail them under simulated hurricane and tornado wind pressures, weld steel bars and pull them apart, and forensically examine the failures. Students use software to analyze and design steel truss bridges, and become proficient at using spreadsheets to perform routine structural calculations and graph the results. Students become familiar with structural concrete by designing, building and testing small-scale reinforced-concrete frames to resist large dynamic forces.