Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Abstract

The author has recently developed a new course at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to address concepts of advanced structures. The course covers topics and approaches that are typically not present in Civil and Environmental Engineering curricula, with the main focus being to foster students’ intuition and understanding of the behavior of structural systems. An important part of the course is the hands-on component where the students are challenged to develop methods to build, support, load test, measure, record, and analyze behavior of various shell types through building physical models. Students work in groups with distinctive tasks, yet they all have to collaborate extensively in order to successfully integrate their work and to develop an experiment for load testing the models. This article presents how the students responded to the challenges and learned by solving issues, making decisions, testing models, and visually observing model failures.

Keywords

conceptual design finite element method analyses load cells load testing paper mache physical models plaster ruled surface spherical shell

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Amiri

. Elastic and plastic buckling of spherical shells under various loading conditions. PhD Dissertation, Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS, 2011.

Telalov

Agulov

. Experimental investigation of the dynamic stability of spherical shells under pulse loading by eternal pressure. Int J Appl Mech 1990; 26(10): 957–960.

Yamada

Uchiyama

Yamada

. Experimental investigation of the buckling of shallow spherical shells. Int J Nonlinear Mech 1983; 18(1): 37–54.

Gergely

Banavalkar

Parker

. The analysis and behavior of thin-steel hyperbolic parboiled shells. Research report 338, 1 January 1971. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University.

Markov

. Hands-on approach to cross-disciplinary teaching. In: Hawaii University International conference 2012 education, math and engineering technology, 2012, http://www.huichawaii.org/assets/2012-education,-math–engineering-technology-program-book.pdf

Markov

. Performance based integrated structural models. In: BTES proceeding, Toronto, ON, Canada, 4–7 August 2011.

Adriaenssens

Stockhusen

Gabriele

. A project-based approach to learning form finding of structural surfaces. Int J Space Struct 2015; 30: 297–305.

http://idav.ucdavis.edu/~okreylos/ResDev/SARndbox/

Supplementary Material

Please find the following supplemental material available below.

For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.

For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.

0.00 MB