Interdisciplinary Graduate Experience: Lessons Learned

Engineers interact in the workplace with technical peers in other disciplines at all stages of design, development, and application. Awareness of the constraints and needs of the other disciplines can be key in many situations. Such interdisciplinary activity and the associated communication are facilitated if the all participants have a solid knowledge of discipline-specific terminology and an understanding of connecting concepts. Consequently, experience relating to interdisciplinary teamwork is a necessary component of engineering education. The Smart Engineering Group at the University of Missouri-Rolla was established to conduct interdisciplinary research and to create interdisciplinary educational resources. The topical interest area is smart structures which requires the integration of materials, structures, sensing, signal processing, manufacturing, etc. The interdisciplinary research and educational activities of the group, the assessment of those activities, and the experiences of several graduate students will be described. The effectiveness of collaborative student work was tied to the students- understanding of the needed synergy and their comfort with cross-disciplinary communication. Also, an interdisciplinary course, which grew out of the group-s experiences, provided systematic preparation for graduate research projects. The role of this course will be discussed as it relates to the quality of collaborative experiences from both student and faculty perspectives

Smart Fiber-Reinforced Polymer Rods Featuring Improved Ductility and Health Monitoring Capabilities

The strain-measuring capability of fiber optic strain gages in fiber-reinforced polymer (FRP) rebars was investigated for failure-inducing loads. Fiber optic interferometric sensors were embedded in a pultruded carbon fiber core and then another layer of carbon fibers were filament wound around the core to form a shell. Pultrusion and filament winding techniques protect the fiber optic strain gages from the concrete environment while providing a secure bond to the core and additional ductility to the overall FRP rebar. Tests of coupon FRP rebar and of FRP-rebar-reinforced concrete beams show that the fiber optic strain gages can read internal strain through failure and can duplicate data from conventional linear variable differential transformers and electrical resistance strain gages. Also, the shell of the FRP rebar inside the concrete beams failed before the rebar core providing pseudo-ductility

Smart Truss for Education

This work discusses a laboratory resource and associated lecture material that are implemented in an interdisciplinary course \u27Smart Structures and Sensors.\u27 Instruction in structural behavior, sensor systems, and experimental systems issues is supported. The Smart Truss Bridge is a reconfigurable aluminum truss structure that is instrumented with strain sensors. It is designed to be representative of a full-scale steel bridge such that person loads produce reasonable strain levels. This multiple-bay truss can be configured with and without redundant members. Strain instrumentation with extrinsic Fabry-Perot Interferometric fiber optic sensors demonstrates the performance and use of sensor systems. Theoretical analysis and experimental measurement may be correlated for different load placements. Observations include elastic strain behavior as well as practical experimental issues such as noise and non-ideal connections. A smart structures case study shows the use of artificial neural networks in a monitoring application. The weight and location of a load are predicted using different combinations of member strain. The Smart Truss Bridge provides educational opportunities for students with different majors to investigate infrastructure technologies and to interact across the disciplines. The topics are relevant to current infrastructure research and problems