February, 8th 2022 | SEAoT TAMU Game Night
On the February 8th SEAoT TAMU chapter organized a game night for new incoming students and past student members to introduce itself and its mission. The event was held in collaboration with the Civil and Environmental Engineering Graduate Student Association (CEEGSA). Around 30 students attended the event and it was a very informative and fun night.
February, 10th 2022 |BakerRisk | SEAoT TAMU 1st General Meeting
For the first meeting of the Spring 2020 Semester, we had the privilege of hosting Thomas Mander P.E. from BakerRisk. First of all, Thomas introduced himself briefly and his role at BakerRisk in protective structure design. Then he mentioned the consultancy services BakerRisk provides to his client in process safety, blast effect, material engineering etc.
After that, he mentioned some of the conventional guidelines available such as ASCE 7, ACI, PCI, TMS, AISC etc for the blast design and their requirements in design. Then he gave examples of fire and blast hazards that occurred in the past. Then he went through the minimum design requirement for blast loading given in IBC, ASCE 7 and International Fire Code (IFC). He also provided an interesting example problem for static design of a reinforced concrete box to resist 100psf using IFC code. Later in the presentation he provided some of the blast design guidelines to be used in actual practice which includes the technical reports, US Government Compliance Standards. He gave the definition of blast wave and importance of the wave shape and duration in blast design. He provided the example of a building damaged with blast loading with several images and video in slow motion. He also highlighted the main structural dynamic principals to be considered while designing for blast loading. He showed some research and development work done at BakerRisk on blast analysis of precast concrete walls with experiments depicting low, medium, high damage of walls. Pressure impulse curves and their use to assess the damage of structural components was also discussed by him. Lastly, he told the summer internship opportunities available at BakerRisk for undergraduate and graduate students with a brief overview of work they will be doing at BakerRisk during their internship. Then we had a very informative Q&A session as the last part of the meeting.
February, 24th 2022 | KPFF | SEAoT TAMU 2nd General Meeting
For second meeting we hosted Benjamin Hicks, S.E. from KPFF, one of the largest civil and structural engineering firms in U.S. First of all, Ben provided high profile introduction of himself and KPFF. Then interesting part of meeting starts. Ben gave presentation on design of casinos located on west coast of U.S. Casinos provides designer and architecture to push the limit of design with reduce bounds of budget to produce marvels of engineering. He discussed the three casinos design first Pechanga, largest casino in California, second Valley View, and last Table Mountain. He highlighted the design challenges, site constrains, and uniqueness for all the three projects. In Pechanga casino, main design was designing of 150 ft span roof truss for ballroom and bracing design for seismic loads. He also mentioned the importance use of Revit in modelling of glass lobby as each wall of lobby was inclined at different angle. For Valley View casino, one of the main challenges was to design supporting column for the canopies because of the unique architecture requirement. All the column connections were different from each other there was no repetition in design for connection. Final casino discussed was the Table Mountain. Torsional design was the main and challenge part of casino as it is located on sloping ground and design cantilever Eagles landing restaurant. Lastly, we had interesting Q&A session as final part of meeting. Ben also shared his experience on taking 16-hour Structural Engineering Exam for California State.
