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- All Subjects: Civil Engineering
- All Subjects: Micro GA
- Creators: Hjelmstad, Keith
- Member of: Theses and Dissertations
Innovative teaching methods must be studied and implemented to optimize student learning and prepare future generations for complex challenges. Dr. Keith Hjelmstad, a professor at Arizona State University, developed such an approach, “The Mechanics Project,” and has implemented it in foundational engineering mechanics courses. Although course instructors have used traditional “lecture and read” approaches for generations, the world is changing, requiring a modified policy. In this thesis, I research, discuss, and analyze the positive effects of The Mechanics Project for civil engineering students based on its fundamental principles.
The goal of this creative thesis is to focus on the experience of women in the field of STEM and more specifically civil engineering. This project will explore four main topics surrounding women in the workforce: how women navigate and succeed in a workforce with predominant male presence, how women advance their career given the gender barriers of the industry, including motherhood, and “impostor syndrome” in the workforce
A considerable amount of studies have been conducted for the past four decades. Most researchers have used constraints and tried to minimize the cost of the structure by reducing the weight of it [8]. Although this approach may be true for steel structures, it is not accurate for composite structures such as reinforced and prestressed concrete. Maximizing the amount of reinforcing steel to minimize the weight of the overall structure can produce an increase of the cost if the price of steel is too high compared to concrete [8]. A better approach is to reduce the total cost of the structure instead of weight. However, some structures such as Prestressed Concrete AASHTO Girders have been standardized with the purpose of simplifying production, design and construction. Optimizing a bridge girder requires good judgment at an early stage of the design and some studies have provided guides for preliminary design that will generate a final economical solution [17] [18]. Therefore, no calculations or optimization procedure is required to select the appropriate Standard AASHTO Girder. This simplifies the optimization problem of a bridge girder to reducing the amount of prestressing and mild steel only. This study will address the problem of optimizing the prestressing force of a PC AASHTO girder by using linear programming and feasibility domain of working stresses. A computer program will be presented to apply the optimization technique effectively.