Structural Engineering
Structural Engineering
What gives an engineer confidence to project and build something as large and graceful as the Golden Gate Bridge (the creation of late Purdue professor Charles A. Ellis) knowing that it has to withstand the demands of gravity, wind, and earthquakes?
The Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, California
Why did Gaudi think of the Sagrada Familia “upside-down” before he started building it?
The Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, Spain (inverted model on the left, actual structure on the right)
Who decides how much reinforcing steel goes into a reinforced concrete column supporting 100 floors in a skyscraper? And how do they make that decision?
How far apart can we place the supports of steel girders in our bridges?
If these questions spark your interest, if you would like to test to failure structural models in one of the largest laboratories in the country, then structural engineering is the right career choice for you. Join Purdue’s School Civil Engineering and enroll in structural engineering courses to leave a mark that will benefit and inspire many, and last the test of time as the Golden Gate has.
Spotlights
November 22, 2019
Robert J. Frosch, Ph.D., P.E., F.ASCE, a professor of civil engineering and senior associate dean of Facilities & Operations in the College of Engineering at Purdue University, has been named a Fellow by the ASCE Board of Direction.
November 22, 2019
The Bowen Laboratory has been selected to receive the Charles S. Whitney Medal by the American Concrete Institute (ACI). This honor was bestowed by the ACI Board of Direction specifically "In recognition for its large-scale civil engineering research in systems, materials and technologies, and for its long time and consistent contribution to the economy and safety of buildings and infrastructure."
June 27, 2019
Rih-Teng Wu, a PhD candidate from Smart Informatix Laboratory directed by Assistant Professor Mohammad Jahanshahi, received the best student paper award by the Structural Control and Health Monitoring Committee at ASCE Engineering Mechanics Institute (EMI) conference which was held at Caltech, Pasadena, CA on June 18-21, 2019. The title of Rih-Teng's paper is "Pruning Deep Convolutional Neural Networks for Efficient Edge Computing in Structural Health Monitoring."
June 21, 2019
Herta Montoya, a first year PhD student in civil engineering, was awarded 2nd place in the ASCE Dynamics Committee student paper presentation at the Engineering Mechanics Conference in Pasadena California on July 18-21, 2019.
June 12, 2019
In the spring semester, Edward M. Curtis Visiting Professor Luis B. Fargier-Gabaldon created and ran a new class for our graduate students called Sizing Bridges. As the name implies, the class focused on the design of bridges — both historical and modern.
June 6, 2019
A tiny crack in a nuclear reactor, skyscraper, bridge or dam can cause catastrophic consequences. The Minneapolis bridge collapse, which killed 13 people in 2007, is just one example of what can happen when structural integrity is compromised. Unidentified or underidentified structural damage in nuclear reactors can be cataclysmic. Inspection of critical systems such as nuclear reactors is complicated and time-consuming. Videos captured by an automatic crack detection system can easily misidentify small scratches or welds as cracks, so technicians must review videos frame by frame. It is a time-consuming process with opportunities for human errors.
April 12, 2019
The Purdue University Board of Trustees on Friday (April 12) ratified the naming of Robert J. Connor as the Jack and Kay Hockema Professor in Civil Engineering.
April 2, 2019
Amit Varma, Karl H. Kettelhut Professor in Civil Engineering and Director of Bowen Laboratory, has been selected to receive the 2019 Shortridge Hardesty Award from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) and the Structural Engineering Institute (SEI). He will be presented the award on April 27, 2019, at the Structures Congress in Orlando, Florida.
March 29, 2019
Robert Frosch, senior associate dean of facilities and operations and professor of civil engineering, has been named an ACE Fellow for academic year 2019-20 by the American Council on Education (ACE).
February 18, 2019
The American Concrete Institute has named Purdue University with the ACI Award for University Student Activities.
February 14, 2019
A recently published paper co-written by a group of researchers including Shirley Dyke, Santiago Pujol, and Julio Ramirez, has been selected by ASCE as the Editor's Choice.
February 14, 2019
In a recent Chicago Tribune article, Prof. Mark Bowman offered expert analysis of cracks discovered in the 33-year old Lake Shore Drive bridge.
January 22, 2019
A team of graduate students from the Lyles School of Civil Engineering placed first runner-up in the first image-based structural damage recognition competition, namely PEER Hub ImageNet (PHI) Challenge organized by the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research (PEER) Center. Rih-Teng Wu, Tarutal Ghosh Mondal, Yu-Ting Huang and Cheng Qian are the team members from Smart Informatix Laboratory directed by Assistant Professor Mohammad Jahanshahi.
December 11, 2018
Purdue civil engineering students took first place in the 2018 International Bridge Competition, tied with Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan. The team consisted of undergraduate students Hassan Bin Ammar, Eshana Kolli, Ziyan Lu, Darryl Sexton, Tianlong Sun, Ertica Susanto, Charley Yang, and PhD student Kinsey Skillen. Support for the team was provided by Prof. Santiago Pujol, Associate Professor Ayhan Irfanoglu, and Visiting Professor Luis Fargier.
November 27, 2018
California's deadly Camp Fire is now 100 percent contained, but low humidity and strong winds in the state mean that wildfires could strike again. Unfortunately, better building materials and planning can only offer so much protection, says Julio Ramirez, the center director for the National Science Foundation's Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure Network Coordination Office, and Purdue's Karl H. Kettelhut Professor of Civil Engineering.
August 18, 2018
A recently-established College of Engineering center has made three seed grant awards in the first year of its seed grant competition. Researchers with the Center for Resilient Infrastructures, Systems, and Processes (CRISP) develop solutions to questions such as: What causes some systems - computing, cyber physical, or large-scale engineered systems - to be resilient to disruptions of various kinds? And what causes some systems to “bounce back” from a failure quickly? The projects chosen for seed funding will address different aspects of these broad questions.
August 9, 2018
Civil Engineering grad student Ting-Wei Wang has been named one of five students to receive the 2018-2019 Daniel P. Jenny Research Fellowship from the Precast/Prestressed Concrete Institute. The program connects professors and students with industry experts to advance research in precast concrete. In addition, Ting-Wei was also selected as the recipient of the Alan Mattock Graduate Scholarship. This scholarship is awarded to only one of the five students who received the PCI Fellowship.
August 2, 2018
Mohammad Jahanshahi, Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering, was awarded the 2017 Kobori Prize recognizing the best paper published in Structural Control and Health Monitoring (SCHM).
April 12, 2018
Mete A. Sözen, Karl H. Kettelhut Distinguished Professor, Emeritus of Civil Engineering, Purdue University died unexpectedly on April 5, 2018, just a few weeks before what would have been his 88th birthday. Mete was in London, England, with his wife Joan visiting their daughter Ayshe and two grandsons when he fell peacefully to sleep. For all of us who knew Mete, this marked the end of an era. Few people have guided and nurtured a field the way Mete led earthquake and structural engineering related to reinforced concrete systems over a period spanning six decades. He had a profound effect on many people and will long be remembered fondly by those who came into contact with him during his career. A celebration of Dr. Sözen's career in teaching will take place on October 11th as the last seminar in The Art of Teaching | Engineering Art series. Dr. Polat Gülkan will deliver the seminar, to which all family, alumni, friends and colleagues are invited to attend and share memories of Dr. Sözen.
December 22, 2017
A team in earthquake-prone Seattle is daring to deliver an 850-ft-tall "proof of concept" for a composite structural-steel frame, instead of a steel frame around a reinforced concrete core. The $570-million Rainier Square Tower project is the culmination of three decades of exploration into composite steel structures for CE alumnus Ron Klemencic, with research being conducted at Bowen Laboratory since 2006.
