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Existing physical structures help civil engineering students understand structural design

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Conference

ASEE Southeast Section Conference

Location

Arlington, Virginia

Publication Date

March 12, 2023

Start Date

March 12, 2023

End Date

March 14, 2023

Conference Session

Civil, Electrical, and Eng Tech

Tagged Topic

Professional Engineering Education Papers

Page Count

7

DOI

10.18260/1-2--45010

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/45010

Download Count

94

Paper Authors

biography

Natalia Cardelino Mercer University

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Dr. Cardelino is Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering at Mercer University. She earned her PhD in Civil Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and an MEng and BS in Civil Engineering from Cornell University. She is a licensed professional engineer in Massachusetts and Georgia. Before obtaining her PhD, she worked as a consulting engineer for 17 years at Arup in their London, NY and Boston offices and most recently at Uzun + Case Engineers in Atlanta. Her current research interests include producing sustainable concrete mixes by replacing a portion of energy-intensive Portland cement with blends of limestone powder and metakaolin.

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Caroline Bowers

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Abstract

Civil Engineering students in Structural Design often struggle making the connection between what they are learning in class and its application to the real world. They can have difficulty understanding design elements in structures as a whole. The majority of examples that students are exposed to in class are not representative of the real world by being limited to an isolated beam, column, frame, or truss. While these types of examples can be beneficial when introducing new concepts, students are lacking experience understanding, analyzing, and designing structures as a whole. To improve the understanding of design elements, a real structure was selected to be used to write steel design problems. A connector bridge between two engineering buildings on Mercer University’s campus was selected due to its familiarity and accessibility to students. The content of these problems included tension and compression design, flexure design, shear design, combined forces design, composite member design, and connection design. Students will be surveyed to determine the effectiveness of using existing structures to create example problems.

Cardelino, N., & Bowers, C. (2023, March), Existing physical structures help civil engineering students understand structural design Paper presented at ASEE Southeast Section Conference, Arlington, Virginia. 10.18260/1-2--45010

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