Civil & Environmental Engrg 597V - ST- Structural Integrity

Engineering failures are always interesting stories which ignite concerns about the condition of our infrastructure and our methods of designing, constructing and modeling structural systems. Every engineering loss is also a lesson to be learnt through the study of how, why and what happened and what can be done to prevent future failures. This course will consist of two main parts. The first part will investigate prominent structural failures and will present to the students the forensic investigations outcomes and main related issues narrating the known facts reported. From the World Trade Center attacks to the Minnesota I-35W bridge collapse, the first part will cover several case studies. The second part of the course will focus on modeling and simulation processes in computational mechanics and structural engineering. Emphasis will be given through examples demonstrating the sensitivity of the models and the results to simple assumptions.

Pre Req: CE-ENGIN 331