Educational modeling and load testing of shells

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.