CVEN90016: Concrete Design and Technology

Steel Design Week (30%)
Bridge Design Assignment (10%)
3-hour Exam (60%)

Well, well, well, another Structural Theory and Design review. I’m going to keep it pretty short, because – in most facets – there’s little difference to ST&D 1 and 2. Major difference is that if you’re a civil major, you don’t need to do it; though its a core subject for structural majors, it’s just an elective for civil swivels like me.

Elisa Lumantarna is at the helm again, but takes a smaller proportion of the lectures compared to the previous subjects. As a coordinator, she’s as good as ever – plenty of consultation hours, creepily quick to answer emails, and also pretty quick to fix any issues that may crop up.

The content of the subject really just expands on ST&D 2, and you’re expected to bring your knowledge from that subject into this one – though it’s not taught specifically in this course, there will be times where you’ll have to know things like calculating steel section and connection capacities. You’ll go into further detail on the direct stiffness stuff (learning how to account for deflection within your models and dealing with trusses and frames), you’ll learn some stuff about the fundamentals of finite element modelling, you’ll have some Eng Materials flashbacks as Emad Gad covers cold-form steel (in a little more detail this time), and you’ll also have some lectures on more practical stuff like conceptual design and composite members. Oh, and timber design – which featured in ST&D1 but was left out of ST&D2 – is back, and you’ll go into some detail on modification factors and the like.

Like the other Structural subjects, most of the content is relatively easy once you get your head around it. But as always, there’s plenty to remember.

During the Student-Staff Liaison Committee meeting run by the infrastructure eng department, me and a couple of others brought up the issue I mentioned back in my review of ST&D2: the exam was way, way too long. This feedback was obviously listened to, because this semester’s exam was far more reasonable. Well, it was actually possible to finish it within the allotted time anyway. So yeah, really nice to see that the staff are receptive to the concerns of students.

The exam itself was exactly what you’d expect – it followed the format of past exams pretty closely, and Elisa pretty much told us what to expect and how many marks each section would be allocated in the subject’s final lecture. Putting the FEM stuff on there was a little rough though; as I mentioned, this section wasn’t particularly well taught, and it was the first year that it was part of this subject so it wasn’t to be found in past exams. Luckily, the lone FEM question was pretty easy.

It’s also nice that the exam for ST&D3 is only worth 60%, far less than for the previous subjects. This takes a bit of pressure off, and – as most groups tend to do pretty well on the assignments and the exam isn’t a hurdle – you shouldn’t need to do all that much for a pass.

Yes

Elisa Lumantarna, Massoud Sofi, Emad Gad, plus a couple of industry guest lecturers

Basically, you can refer to previous reviews – the lectures are given by the same people and aren’t much different.

However, I found the set of lectures on Finite Element stuff given by Massoud Sofi to be pretty poor. There was about 6 hours or so of them, and they just kind of ran around in circles, and I don’t know exactly what we are meant to take out of them or what was assessable. Hopefully they’ll fix this up and make it a bit more concise and provide proper examples, because it did end up on the exam.

ST&D 3 pretty much does away with tutes. While you do have some computer lab classes, the traditional weekly tutes don’t feature in the subject. This is a bit of a let down in some ways, as it would be nice to go through some questions for some of the numerical stuff, but – for the most part – the lectures themselves provide ample examples (#rhymez) that should give you a pretty good idea of how to answer questions and what you’re expected to be able to do in an exam (the FEM section being the noticeable exception for this).

This review has ended up longer than I intended so I’ll keep this as short as my natural tendency towards verbosity allows me. ST&D 3 is a quality subject that is well taught, well coordinated, and well conceived. Like its sister subjects, there’s plenty to learn and plenty to remember, but – other than the FEM stuff – it never gets overly complex or obfuscated. Doors plus, no fuss.

Yes, with fully worked solutions for numerical questions

4/5

Steel Design Week is the selling point of the subject and probably the thing you’re meant to take out of it.

The assignment itself is split into two phases, and is completed in self-formed groups of 6. You’re expected to work in your group pretty much all day every day for the week, and you’ll have Phase A of the assignment due mid-week and Phase B due the Monday after.

The week starts with a reveal of what structure is to be designed. This year it was a steel VMS gantry (in layman’s terms, a thing that holds up road signs over a highway or the like), but in the past it’s been things like a steel platform, catwalk, basically any framed or trussed steel structure.

Phase A of the assignment is a conceptual design. You have to work out gravity, wind and earthquake loading for the structure, provide a few approximate calculations for member forces, and assess the required member sizes to ensure that it will stand up (we hope). You’re given about a day and a half to do this – it’s a rush, but you should be fine if you can live with a multitude of typos and niggly errors within your report (proofreading be damned).

Phase B is a detailed design. For this, you’re actually given the dimensions of the structure (i.e. its height and width (but not that of the members)) and once again you’ll have to come up with appropriate section sizes for the members as well as connections for them.

This doesn’t sound too bad, but your also going to have to create a direct stiffness model using excel to solve for the forces in the members. And if your structure is anything like our one was, your going to end up with a matrix that would be at home in Brobdingnag (killer literary reference right there that a good 0.01% of those reading are going to get). So, yeah, this can be a bit of a fiddly and frustrating process.

Phase A is worth 6% of your final mark for the subject whilst Phase B is worth 24%.

So though it can be a little overbearing and life consuming at times, steel week was the best thing about the subject and one of the best parts of any subject I’ve done in masters so far, but it helps that I was part of a really good group.

You’ll need the copy of HB48 that you would’ve had for ST&D2, and you’ll probably have to print out some pages from the Timber standard for the exam, but AS3600 stays on the shelf.

1x two-hour lecture, 1 x one-hour lecture per week, irregular tutorials/computer labs, 1x life consuming steel design week

Semester 2, 2015

H1

Group Assignment (10%)
Prac Attendance (2%)
MST (8%)
Individual Assignment (10%)
3-hour exam (70%)

The assignments in this subject are somewhat pointless to be honest.

The first one is a prac report of sorts, except that the prac is in the form of a video from 1998. In 1998 I was in grade prep. So yeah.

Overall it’s a decent assignment, but you can answer it quite easily by following the cues and clues that Helen gives in the notes. So you can pretty much just plug, chug, and end up with a pretty good result. Most people I know got over 90%.

This assignment is done in staff-allocated groups of 2-4, and to allocate groups, Helen literally writes down a sequence of numbers on a printed out list of the students enrolled in the subject in week 1. This is dumb for quite a few reasons, but mainly because having people drop out or enrolled late into a subject is not uncommon and this weird method of group allocation doesn’t account for that at all. This unnecessarily caused issues in terms of non-existent group members and uneven groups. I mean, it’s masters: most students are in either their third-last or final semester by this point – I think we can sort out our own groups.

This assignment was originally given a due date that largely overlapped with the ST&D3 Steel Design Week. Most students doing one of those subjects will be doing the other concurrently, so it’s lucky that Helen allowed some extra time after realising this. However, I think the ST&D folks are more to blame for this as Steel Week was a week later than usual.

The second assignment is on the deformation modelling component taught by Nelson Lam. This assignment also has big issues; it basically involves designing a concrete section and using moment-curvature relationships to calculate it’s capacity. That sounds like a bit of a challenge, right, and it would be if you weren’t given a spreadsheet that pretty much does it for you. Again, you can just plug in the numbers, rearrange some formulas, press enter, and get a good result despite having no idea what you’re doing.

Both of the assignments needlessly require physical submission.

But the worst part of this subject was the exam. It’s a hurdle, worth 70%, and a three-hour concrete marathon. It’s one of those exams where you can never really be sure how many marks you’re going to get for a question. A lot of it is derivative, and you’re given past exams with numerical answers, but I prepared for it like a maniac and still came out of it feeling somewhat defeated. Weirdly, I must’ve gone a lot better than I thought I did to end up with a H1. Flashbacks to Eng Mech.

This is an elective subject with maybe 80-100 students enrolled, mostly Structural Eng majors. It’s one of two electives that are “highly recommended” if you’re doing Structural, and I guess I can kind of see why.

I’ll go into more detail below, but this is a subject that really should be better than it is and could be with a few slight adjustments to make it more amendable to students in the context of 2015.

Going into this, students will already have a good grasp on the basics of concrete design through subjects like Eng Materials, and Structural Theory and Design 1 and 2. This subject introduces prestressed concrete, which acts as it’s main focus. For interests sake (on the off chance you’re interested in concrete), prestressed concrete is concrete made stronger by applying some kind of axial force below the middle of the concrete cross-section, causing a beam to camber up. This then opposes the tendency for the concrete to deflect downwards due to normal loading. You’ll find prestressed concrete in pretty much every major concrete-based structure; bridges, high rise buildings etc. Hence the subject’s importance for structural majors.

Yes

Mainly Helen Goldsworthy

I don’t want to have a go at Helen Goldsworthy because she’s a nice and enthusiastic lady, but she’s a bit of a frump and I don’t think she’s a good lecturer. Her slides literally have the ugliest colour scheme ever, and, for some reason, none of the lectures are titled. This means that the lectures have the tendency to blend into each other, and sometimes it’s hard to figure out her reasoning behind when and why she’s introducing certain concepts.

Helen tends to use the document camera sparingly, and often her explanations leave you more confused than enlightened. She also relies on the textbook quite a bit, especially when giving examples. Unlike ST&D, where Elisa will generally go through at least a few of the examples by hand, Helen tends to just scroll through horribly scanned textbook excerpts and hopes you somehow soak up the content through osmosis or something.

You also get some lectures from Massoud Sofi, who pretty much everyone should be familiar with from some other subject in their 3+ years of uni to this point. His lectures are mainly on the chemistry of concrete, which students coming from Bachelor’s at the UoM would’ve already covered back in Eng Materials. Massoud is as clear and concise as ever so these are some of the better lectures of the subject.

Nelson Lam also chips in with a few lectures on deformation modelling towards the end of semester. He’s a hell of a guy but I’ll get to why these weren’t that valuable in the assessment section.

There was also a pretty poorly delivered lecture on strut and tie models with Priyan Mendis of High Rise Structures fame. Luckily, this is only given about 15/180 marks on the final exam and the questions don’t get too complicated.

But probably the best thing about the lectures of this subject is when they get some people from the industry in. You have Shan Kumar run you through some design stuff, Simon Hughes give you some info on precast concrete and floor plans, and Will Ferrell lookalike and top bloke Martin Hewitt go through a section design exercise.

As for tutes, they run on a fairly irregular schedule. My tutor Anita Amirsardari was really good and the tutes materials themselves were fine. However, the answers are handwritten on the school of eng computation sheets; these sheets are gridded and – when scanned in black and white – they can be quite hard to read.

This subject had the most labyrinthine LMS page I have ever encountered. Say I want to find a supplementary note for one of the lectures, here what I’d have to do:
→Log on to LMS
→Click on Concrete Design and Technology
→Click on “Documents” link
→Try to remember what specific week these notes were from (made more difficult by the “content blending together” issue I spoke about earlier)
→Click “week x”
→Click on “Supplemental Notes”
→Realise this is the wrong week, press back twice
→Click “week y”
→Click on “Supplemental Notes”
→Try to find which of the several documents you are actually looking for
→Yay right week!

Yeah, it’s an iterative process, and it’s pretty much the Bermuda triangle of LMSes.

The content and ideas behind this subject aren’t too bad. And with a top notch lecturer, some more thought behind the assessment, an update in the subject materials and a more streamlined student experience, it could be really good. Let’s hope they make some changes, because I mentioned all of these issues in the SES (except the exam, because for some reason SESes seem to be oblivious to the most crucial part of a subject) and I’m sure others did too.

Yes, with numerical solutions

2/5

Ol' mate AS3600. There's also a few recommended texts but I got by without them.

1x two-hour lecture and 1x two-hour swing class (used for tutes, workshops, lectures)

Semester 2, 2015

H1