Workforce Development

TRANS-IPIC is fostering research and education that will innovate PC technology by addressing materials, design, modeling, manufacturing, quality control, installation, operations, and condition assessment. 

Our partner institutions have a strong record in establishing science and engineering programs with experts and specialties that span the field of infrastructure technologies. We believe that a diverse educational framework is critical to enable the delivery of comprehensive solutions to infrastructure challenges. 

We are establishing this educational framework for a new generation of transportation professionals who are passionate about contributing to infrastructure solutions. This consortium is committed to engaging students from all backgrounds and participating in K-12 outreach programs in underserved communities across the U.S. 

TRANS-IPIC consists of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Purdue University, University of Buffalo, Louisiana State University, and the University of Texas San-Antonio, which is one of the largest minority-serving institutions in the nation. 

Building with Memory

The Transportation Infrastructure Precast Innovation Center (TRANS-IPIC) had a blast hosting high school students during the Grainger Engineering ‘City Designers and Builders’ Summer Camp! Our session, Building with Memory, was an absolute blast for everyone involved. We can’t wait for next year!

Building Bridges with Memory

The Transportation Infrastructure Precast Innovation Center (TRANS-IPIC) was thrilled to be work with the Worldwide Youth in Science and Engineering (WYSE) Program and the TRIO Upward Bound Program, teaching six enthusiastic high school students this Summer!

For those that are not aware of the TRIO Upward Bound program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign:

• Upward Bound, housed in the Office of Minority Student Affairs, has been a part of the Illinois community since 1966. Upward Bound is committed to providing students with high quality academic, cultural, and career related activities designed to prepare and equip them to successfully complete high school, enroll in an accredited post-secondary institution and obtain a baccalaureate degree.

Building Bridges with Memory

By David Olatunji

Building bridges with memory was a class offered through the TRANS-IPIC center to local high school students in the Urbana-Champaign area via the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s TRIO Upward Bound Program. Housed in the Office of Minority Student Affairs, the TRIO Upward Bound Program is dedicated to providing high quality academic, cultural, and career related activities for students from Centennial, Central, and Urbana High Schools. 

As representatives of the University of Illinois’ TRANS-IPIC center, Alex Chen and I, David Olatunji, had the opportunity to mentor and introduce our TRIO Upward Bound students to STEM, Engineering, Civil Engineering, Bridges, Shape Memory Alloys, and other things transportation and civil engineering related. 

We had ten sessions with our students to expose them to a variety of ideas, activities, and experiences that would introduce them to the world of bridges and civil engineering and encourage our students to consider becoming civil engineers themselves.

We had five students at various levels of high school. We had an incoming ninth grader, two incoming tenth graders, and two incoming juniors. Our students were from all three high school mentioned above and were not all familiar with each other, so our first objective was to plan activities that could help both our students and ourselves to get to know each other a little bit better.

Day 1

In our first session, we played a game of bingo. The idea behind this activity was to get our students to share their different experiences with each other and to hopefully begin to develop a closeness with each other from shared experiences. We also encouraged our students to ask for and remember each other’s names because we thought that it would be important for both us and our students to know how to address each other on a first name basis. 

Additionally, we took our students on a tour of Newmark lab and briefly showed them some of the work that our colleagues in the TRANS-IPIC center were working on. We thought that it was important to expose our students to bridge research right away so that they could begin to develop a curiosity for everything bridge related and to develop an understanding of bridges from a research perspective, something that we felt confident that they hadn’t experienced before but would be helpful in laying the foundation for the course.

Day 2

The focus of our second session was shape memory alloys (SMA). We wanted to introduce our students to the wonders of how this amazing material works and we wanted to get them thinking about how such a material can be used in the world of civil engineering.

Professor Bassem Andrawes began this particular session by stretching out an SMA spring and heating it to recover its original shape. Our students seemed to love it! We used both physical and electrical methods to heat the SMA. The idea behind the use various heating methods was to demonstrate the different ways that heat can be generated and introduce our students to the interdisciplinary nature of engineering research and about how knowledge in other engineering fields can help bridge engineering research.

Next, after we developed a general understanding of how shape memory alloys behaved, we wanted to test the strength of our SMA spring. We did this by gradually loading a cup that was held up by the spring with stone aggregate and deforming the spring. After each weight increase and deformation, we re-heated the SMA spring to observe whether or not the spring would recover its original shape.

Day 3

Drafting is a big part of bridge engineering because plans are how engineers communicate their ideas to builders and we wanted the focus of our third session with our students to be all about drafting. We reserved a computer lab and installed Autodesk’s AutoCAD for our introduction to computer aided drafting. 

Before we began drafting, we displayed a set of bridge plans to our students and educated our students on the importance of plans, how to read plans, and in particular, how to read and interpret the different views in a set of bridge plans such as the plan, profile, and elevation views. 

After teaching our students the different views, we had them draft a simple bridge. This being the first time that many of our students had ever done such a thing, it took a little bit of time for them to become familiar with the software and to execute commands accurately, but at the end of the session they had made significant progress and were each able to draw a set of elementary bridge plans in the plan, profile, and elevation views.

Day 4

Our fourth day was a day of detailed exploration. We had briefly shown our students around Newmark on the first day, but the fourth day was a more detailed exploration of the TRANS-IPIC center and a deeper exploration of the work that some of our colleagues were performing. We thought that it would be important to re-visit some of their experiments having set established a baseline familiarity with bridges and research for our students in previous sessions.

We explored the TRANS-IPIC center first and spoke in detail about the different experiments that were at various stations around the room. For example, we talked about the pull-out machine and about the importance of pull-out tests and how such tests helped us understand the bonding properties of two materials to each other. After exploring the TRANS-IPIC center, we spent a considerable amount of time having a closer look at tests such as Siyoung Park’s test that involved prestressing steel bars. 

We emphasized the utility of the prestresssing process and about how prestressing has helped us build stronger bridges because prestressed concrete beams increase a concrete bridge’s resistance to tensile loads. 

Day 5 

It was impossible to share the wonders of bridges to our students without talking about concrete, how it is made, and the properties that make it such a useful material in bridge engineering.

We began this session by creating an analogy between baking a cookie and batching a sample of concrete. Like concrete, a cookie requires a specific mixture of wet and dry ingredients including water and needs to be cured under specific temperature conditions to produce a desired outcome. 

We thought that this analogy would be a simple way of communicating how to cast concrete and that the analogy would also be mentally stimulating. We gave our students cookies to emphasize our ideas.

After letting our students snack for a little bit, we had them cast their own concrete samples with unique mix designs for each student. We embedded fiber reinforced polymer (FRP) bars into our students concrete samples to emulate how reinforcement is typically embedded in concrete for bridge construction. 

This was a very messy, but very stimulating and exciting session for both us and our students.

Day 6

While teaching our students how to draft was important, we also wanted to introduce them to other uses of computer software for bridge engineering so we conducted a second computer lab day with the emphasis of this session being on structural analysis.

Ftool was our software of choice and we led our students through creating their very own truss bridges including creating supports and support conditions, truss members and member properties. We proposed different loading conditions for each of our students so that we could demonstrate a variety of ways in which a bridge can fail. 

Our students learned a valuable lesson about how we use models to replicate bridges and understand their failure points before building them in real life. 

Day 7

The seventh day of Building Bridges with Memory was an exploration of the different types of bridges that we had on campus. We felt like at this stage of the course, our students where familiar with several bridge related concepts such as concrete, SMA, reinforcement, and the idea of bridges, so we wanted to put it all together in a field trip that explored different types of bridges.

The first bridge that we explored was a single span stone bridge with a concrete deck and metal railing. The unique thing about this bridge was that it was a pedestrian bridge with load ratings of no more than that of the weight of a golf cart.

The next bridge we explored was another pedestrian bridge, but this time a bridge with concrete beams to support the deck. We were able to demonstrate the visual and material differences between a concrete bridge and a stone bridge.

After the concrete bridge, we took our students to a heavy-duty steel bridge that was beneath a larger road. This bridge was the most robust bridge we explored on the day because it supported bus and truck live loads. In fact, we were able to see how the bridge supported several busses as they drove over the deck of the bridge. We were also able to introduce our students to steel beams that support bridges and to ideas such as why a steel beam might be used to support a bridge deck in stead of a concrete beam.

Day 8

Despite the rain, the eighth session of our class was one of our most memorable because we had the opportunity to tour a concrete casting plant. The idea behind this session was to show our students that the process of creating bridges was not limited to research and design, but also included the physical process of manufacturing, transporting, and casting building materials for a project.

At the concrete plant, our students were able to see heavy duty mixers that combined large samples of aggregate, sand, cement, and water before depositing them into concrete trucks that would take the mix to a construction site. 

Additionally, the gentlemen at the concrete plant shared their day-to-day activities and shared some insights on their careers and how it is the came to work at the concrete plant. 

Our students got to experience the scale of concrete production and also got inspired by the different stories of careers in concrete manufacturing.

Day 9

Our penultimate day was an important day because of our two major objectives:

We casted an adaptive prestressing system (APS) consisting of two concrete blocks held together by an SMA spring
We conducted interviews with our students to get their feedback on the program, what they had learned so far, and suggestions for future programs 
The idea behind the APS system was twofold: We wanted to show our students how bridges are connected through their decks joints and we wanted to show our students how SMA can be use in the future to connect two bridge decks together and move with temperature changes. We cast our samples and let them cure for testing in our final session.

We also conducted interviews with each of our students and got feedback about what our students enjoyed the most about Building Bridges with Memory. We made sure to pick their brains about improvements that can be made to the program for future iterations. A summary of their feedback is in the subsequent conclusions section.

Day 10

We wanted to, literally and figuratively, pull everything together in our final session. What better way to do this than test an SMA connecting to concrete blocks. Our APS system had dried, hardened, and gained strength since the previous session and we wanted to see if the SMA spring would perform similarly to how it had performed before.

For our test, we instructed our students to set both concrete blocks on rollers and to stretch out the SMA spring. Next, we had other students aim a heat gun at the stretched SMA spring. Like magic, the SMA spring recovered its original shape and pulled the two concrete blocks together wowing the students! This experiment was one of the highlights of the program for both us, the instructors, and our students.

After conducting the APS test, we wanted to go about with a bang and thought of no better way of doing so than breaking concrete cylinders. After instructing our students on safety protocol and verifying that each of them was protected with PPE, we proceeded to break two concrete cylinders. Our students were initially startled by the loud BANG of the first break and were thoroughly delighted by the crushing of the second sample.

I would say that we went out on a high note!

Conclusion

This was the inaugural iteration of Building Bridges with Memory and as such, Alex and I had unique challenges in formulating the curriculum to fit the needs of our students without the benefit of having guidance from previous summers. We had to be creative and flexible in preparing various experiences for our students that would be simultaneously educational and stimulating. And we had several challenges in doing so.

The majority of our challenges revolved around finding the balance between lecturing, moving, and experimenting. We wanted to expose our students to the basics of civil engineering but noticed that some of them checked out mentally during long lectures so we had to iterate and shorten some of our lectures. We enjoyed taking our students on tours of the laboratory and campus, but noticed that they became tired and fatigued if we walked too much, so we had to adapt and walk strategically or take more breaks. We also noticed that some of our students could become overwhelmed or distracted during the process of experimentation, especially if activities were performed collectively, so we had to figure out how to keep our students more engaged on the tasks that we had prepared for them rather than on each other. 

Between overcoming these challenges and pushing forward with educating our students through a variety of experiences, we were able to provide all three elements of the TRIO Upward Bound program; academic, cultural, and career related activities. But we by no means arrived at these conclusions on our own, our students feedback gave us this sense of accomplishment:

Quotes from students--

 “I learned how steel and concrete play in big part in making bridges and I learned about live loads and dead loads”

“I liked how [the program] was something that I wanted to do in my future and how it can benefit the way I see how [a civil engineering career] is.”

“This [program] inspired me to get an engineering degree and to eventually take over my grandparents construction business.”

 

I think that the program was a great benefit to everyone involved and was a great learning experience for both students and mentors alike. 

I would like to recognize the TRANS-IPIC center and the TRIO Upward Bound program for making this experience possible. 

I would also like to recognize Alex Chen for his tireless efforts to make this program a success, Professor Bassem Andrawes and Chris Lockwood for their continued support.