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The civil engineering capstone senior design course at Purdue University involves all seniors in their last semester before graduation and is titled “Civil Engineering Design Project.” The course catalog describes it as “Planning, design, and analysis of a civil project; an integrated and realistic group project involving as much as possible all major aspects of the civil engineering profession.” This high-enrollment course (30–120 students per semester) has been team taught since the early 1960s and many approaches to teaching it have been utilized. Since 2001, the version of the course discussed in this paper has been taught in the spring semester with the student teams responding to a request for proposals (RFP) for local projects following the design-build method of project delivery. The proposals are submitted in two phases: (1) conceptual designs and alternatives analyses; and (2) design-build project proposal with approximately 30% complete design, total construction cost, and scheduling. The desig...

The behavior of the World Trade Center Tower 1 on September 11, 2001 is studied in light of experimental data on the effect of elevated temperature on mechanical properties of structural steel. It is concluded that the damage inflicted by aircraft impact on the insulation of the core framing was the dominant factor in the collapse of the structure.

Most of the public school buildings in Turkey and Peru are built according to a small number of template plans. Over the years, these template plans are kept the same while the structural designs are varied with the seismic design codes in force. During recent strong earthquakes in Turkey and Peru, the design concepts and construction styles for these template school buildings have been put to test. In this paper, observed earthquake performances of template reinforced concrete school buildings with moment-frames or moment-frames and shear walls are compared. The comparison reveals choices in design that were successful as well as those that were not. The disastrous results of “captive columns” are demonstrated in illustrations from what has been observed in recent earthquakes in these seismically active countries. It is shown that since 1997 the Peruvian practice has been producing school buildings that perform well during strong earthquakes.

The writers report on a simulation study of the performance of the North Tower (WTC-I) of the World Trade Center complex during the impact of American Airlines Flight 11 on September 11, 2001. We discuss impact damage that the structural core might have sustained and its possible behavior under structural and thermal loading. Our simulations indicate that the worst damage to the core structure was in stories 95 through 97 of the tower. We estimate that a core collapse mechanism could be initiated if the tower core column temperatures were elevated to about 700°C.