News Detail

On "Concrete Education" for the 21st Century

2/1/1998

ACI's many excellent efforts on the educational side were described in my December 1997 Presidential Memo. This month, I would like to add some more personal comments on educational issues pertinent to the concrete industry. My comments are directed primarily at four-year BS degree programs in civil engineering in North America, but this does not at all dilute the importance of our many excellent technology programs leading to associate degrees or to a baccalaureate in technology. Space limitations also do not permit coverage of overseas educational trends and practices, other than to comment on the fact that many foreign programs are very strong.

Three topics affecting the quality of our constructed facilities merit discussion: materials, design, and professional education. The first, materials, has to do with the coverage of cements and concrete in civil engineering curricula. The typical U.S. civil engineering department has reduced the amount of time given to understanding the complexities of concrete. A number of reasons may be cited — pressures to reduce total required hours for graduation to ensure that most students receive their BS in four years, the desire to have time to cover new materials such as plastics, and the gradual reduction in laboratory sessions to reduce costs.

There is one additional issue that really bothers me — the expanding impression in many faculty circles (and also in numerous Deans' offices) that concrete is an old, uninteresting material that does not merit much attention. Apparently, these individuals are not aware of several facts: (1) concrete and masonry will certainly continue to be the most widely used construction materials, (2) R&D efforts in the past two decades have produced tremendous advances in cement-based materials, and (3) the future holds great promise for even more advances, such as more environmentally acceptable cement production and usage, high-performance concretes with greatly enhanced durability and with high efficiencies in transmitting loads, and exciting combinations of concrete with structural steel and with new nonmetallic, composite reinforcements.

On the structural design side, I believe there is urgent need for improvements in several key areas:

• We should provide more emphasis on design of the entire structure, including the critical process of selecting the basic structural type to be used, how the structural elements are connected, and constructibility issues. Some time can be found to make room for coverage of systems and connections, such as by streamlining the teaching of flexure.
• We simply must teach more preliminary design, and more simple methods for quickly sizing the primary components of a structure. Even modest coverage of approximate preliminary design can have a profound effect on a student, helping to develop an intuitive sense about concrete structures and giving a new sense of confidence about dealing with real structural design.
• The proper role of analysis in the design process needs better definition, recognizing that student attitudes on analysis come from the faculty. The root of the problem arises from the common practice of having one group of faculty teach analysis and another group teach design. A solution is pretty obvious!
• Students deserve to get better explanations of the approximate nature of design, including the great variation in actual live loads, the real variability of concrete properties, and how the poorly-defined effects of shrinkage, support motions, unexpected restraining forces, and the like can often "overwhelm" the calculated effects of assumed loadings. An obvious starting point is to use no more than two significant digits in expressing any final results of design calculations. I cannot begin to count the times I've seen (in concrete design books and even in ACI publications) such quantities as M = 25,248.9 in-lbs or beam deflection = 0.0834 in. Students should be seeing these results as M = 25 in-kips and deflection = 0.08 in. Without this first step, how can we possibly expect students to appreciate the fact that "real world" design is not a precise science?

My final point is that we need to supplement our many fine BS programs with more professional education programs to produce engineers with the type of technical background that just cannot be achieved in a four-year BS program. Existing Master of Engineering programs are inherently different from MS programs, with heavy emphasis on design, no research components, and strong involvement of practicing engineers in helping teach design. My own long (and very satisfying) experience in M.Eng. programs has shown that practicing engineers are eager to help teach design.

What can we, the members of ACI, do to help improve the teaching and learning processes on how to best design and build with concrete? We all need to take a much more proactive role in "preaching the gospel" about the unlimited opportunities in expanded usage of improved cements and concretes. We can become members of advisory councils in college civil engineering departments. Consultants, in addition to becoming involved in helping teach design, can volunteer to meet with student groups to discuss recent interesting projects, comment on life in the design profession, and the like. Materials suppliers can likewise come to campus to give talks on new products and new ways of producing better concretes. Construction companies and precast suppliers can offer to host field trips to show the many aspects of the real world that cannot be taught effectively in the classroom or lab. Everyone can get involved and, working together, we can have a major positive impact on improving education.

Richard N. White
President
American Concrete Institute

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