DEVELOPING TECHNICAL ENGLISH SKILLS FOR CIVIL ENGINEERING STUDENTS

Traditionally, Spanish schools of civil engineering provide their students a class on “Technical English” in order to develop their language skills. However, this class does not cover all the skills that the student would need in the labor market and mainly focuses in the reading and writing skills, and in a lower degree in the speaking and listening ones. This paper proposes a series of innovative and informal training activities, such as cine-forum on technical civil engineering topics and role playing on real professional situations, that allow Spanish civil engineering students to develop English skills, that can rarely be worked in the classroom (i.e. speaking, negotiating and conversing), which encourage debate, participation, and foster their self-confidence to speak about technical-English topics in public. Although the students’ level of English is much lower than expected, they all agree on the importance of technical English for their future career. The results also show the students’ lack in skills that are difficult to train in regular classes (speaking and talking). Consequently, this situation would require to provide complementary activities like the ones suggested in this project in order to develop these skills and increase the students’ demand for engineering classes taught in English

Analysis of the construction process of cable-stayed bridges built on temporary supports

The temporary supports erection method is a fast and economical way of building cable-stayed bridges. In this method the bridge deck is first erected on a set of temporary and permanent supports and then, the stays are successively placed and tensioned according to a predefined tensioning sequence. A proper definition and analysis of this sequence is very complex as the structure is highly statically indeterminate, exhibits a non linear behavior and has a changing static scheme.Despite its importance, no specific research referring to the modeling of the temporary support erection method has been found as most of the modeling procedures are proposed for the alternative erection technique, the cantilever erection method. The modeling carried out by most of these methods is based on the opposite construction sequence followed on site, this is to say, the structure is disassembled from the desired final stage (. Objective Completion Stage, . OCS).A procedure, the Backward Algorithm (. BA), is formally presented in this paper for calculation of the erection of cable-stayed bridges built on temporary supports. Because of its simplicity the . BA can be reproduced by any structural code that enables the modeling of the prestresses of the stays by means of imposed strains or imposed temperature increments. Another advantage is that no separate models are needed to calculate the evolution of stresses in the strands when the strand by strand tensioning technique is used. Furthermore, the stay elongations when prestressed can be easily obtained when the stays are prestressed in a single operation or strand by strand. This information is important to control the correct and safe prestressing of the stay on site. In addition, it also help the designer to control if the anchor wedge bites the strand in the same position several times during the prestressing process. © 2012 Elsevier Ltd.Part of this work was done through a collaborative agreement between University of Castilla-La Mancha (Spain) and Tongji University (China). This included an exchange of faculty and scholars. The financial support from Kwang-Hua Foundation from College of Civil Engineering of Tongji University and from the International Relation Office of University of Castilla-La Mancha is greatly appreciated.Lozano-Galant, JA.; Paya-Zaforteza, I.; Xu, D.; Turmo Coderque, J. (2012). Analysis of the construction process of cable-stayed bridges built on temporary supports. Engineering Structures. 40:95-106. doi:10.1016/j.engstruct.2012.02.005S951064

Forward Algorithm for the construction control of cable-stayed bridges built on temporary supports

Traditionally the construction process of cable-stayed bridges is modeled according to the backward approach, as its calculation is much easier using an elastic analysis. In this approach the bridge is disassembled according to the opposite sequence of events which occur during its erection. The main trade off of the backward approach is that time-dependent phenomena, such as creep, shrinkage or cable relaxation, cannot be directly computed as the analysis is performed according to the reversed time direction.In this paper the Forward Algorithm (FA) that is based on the forward approach is formally presented. This procedure has been applied to the temporary supports erection method as no specific investigation of this erection technique has been found by the authors. The FA has the following advantages: (1) Modifications in design and/or tensioning strategy can be easily computed. (2) The effect of time-dependent phenomena can be efficiently included into the calculation of the construction process of the bridge. (3) Differences between the temperatures in the structural elements assumed when doing the structural analysis of the bridge and the real ones when built can be calculated without the need of separate models. (4) The stresses in the mono-strands when the strand by strand prestressing technique is used are obtained directly. (5) Stay and strand elongation, which are very useful to control the prestressing operations, can be also easily computed. All these features make the FA an efficient procedure to control the construction process on site, increasing safety during construction and decreasing construction time. © 2012 Elsevier Ltd.Part of this work was done through a collaborative agreement between University of Castilla-La Mancha (Spain) and Tongji University (China). This included an exchange of faculty and scholars. The finantial support from Kwang-Hua Foundation from College of Civil Engineering of Tongji University and from the International Relation Office of University of Castilla-La Mancha is greatly appreciated.Lozano-Galant, JA.; Paya-Zaforteza, I.; Xu, D.; Turmo Coderque, J. (2012). Forward Algorithm for the construction control of cable-stayed bridges built on temporary supports. Engineering Structures. 40:119-130. doi:10.1016/j.engstruct.2012.02.022S1191304