Hershey Arena: Anton Tedesko’s Pioneering Form

Civil engineering structures are part of our cultural heritage. The story of who we are can be told, in part, by what we have built. There have been pivotal moments in civil engineering design history wherein a master engineer creates a pioneering structure. One major example is Anton Tedesko’s 1936 Hershey Ice Arena, the first large-scale thin shell concrete roof in the United States. Tedesko left all his papers, including the original design and analysis calculations of the Hershey shell, to the Princeton Maillart Archives. These documents, as well as other archival materials and photographs, provide insight into the design history of Hershey, and the transfer of thin shell technology to America. In this paper, we retrace the design and analysis calculations performed by Tedesko, and compare them to modern computer models. We show that the hand calculations are sufficiently accurate, and in fact are necessary for initial form finding. We close by pointing out the enormous impact that this design had in thin shell concrete construction, and argue for the preservation of this remarkable structure

Finite-Element Limit Analysis of the Tucker High School Gymnasium Roof Failure

The Randolph Tucker High School gymnasium roof failure of 1970 has received much scholarly attention. This study will provide a conclusion to a large body of previously published works by means of limit state analysis of the roof failure using state of the art parametric finite-element modeling. Parametric modeling within a general purpose finite-element analysis program allows for extremely rapid changes to the model because key terms are objects or parameters that can be adjusted internally by the program, rather than laboriously entered by the user. The failure of the roof was investigated by means of a limit state analysis, which accurately captured the cracking of the concrete and the yielding of the reinforcing steel. Concrete creep and shrinkage and relaxation of the prestressing steel were also accounted for. Finally, the authors also studied the idea that camber in the roof geometry might have prevented collapse

Myron Goldsmith: The Development of the Diagonally Braced Tube

Myron Goldsmith (1918-96) was a unique figure in the development of tall building design. He successfully blended the roles of architect, engineer and teacher throughout his tenure at Skidmore Owings and Merrill (SOM) and in the Department of Architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). Indeed, many of the projects supervised by Goldsmith and his colleagues, to include the pre-eminent structural engineer Dr. Fazlur Khan (1929-82), directly influenced built work. The few published studies of Goldsmith acknowledge, but do not fully explore, the innovations that Goldsmith oversaw as thesis advisor to many graduate students at IIT in the 1960s. An essential link between the student work and the large-scale office projects at SOM were the “Saturday Sessions.” There, architects, engineers and students met for weekly reviews at IIT and then a lengthy and lively lunch at Bertucci’s restaurant in Chicago. Goldsmith encouraged the free exchange of scholarly and practical ideas during these Saturday Sessions and we argue that this was a vital part of Goldsmith’s pedagogy. This paper will focus on a fascinating network of students, architects, and engineers that led to the innovation of the diagonally braced tube tall building

Rapidly assemled emergency shelters made from "green" materials

p. 799-812This paper describes a research project conducted by the Department of Architectural Engineering, the Department of Architecture and the Department of Materials Engineering at California Polytechnic State University. We are developing a habitable temporary shelter that is durable, sustainable, economical, and rapidly assembled. A basic, repeatable module of the design is a hyperbolic paraboloid (hypar) panel, generated from extruded straight boards of high density polyethylene (HDPE) reinforced with waste-stream agricultural fibers. Our research has shown that the hypar is well suited for a rapidly assembled emergency shelter because it can be generated from straight line segments which can be trucked to the disaster site. Then, using our proposed assembly method, a large span thin shell structure can be rapidly constructed. The paper will discuss the fabrication and the testing of the "green" composite material used for these shelters. This composite material itself was the starting point for a number of design ideas. The uniqueness of the material; its stiffness, strength, and ecologically friendly nature spurred us into thinking about how we could incorporate it into structures. Before designing with this material, we addressed some of its mechanics issues, namely how could we characterize this material under tensile loads and under bending loads. Also, we performed a detailed study of how the material reacted to intense ultraviolet light. Having addressed the mechanics, we began the task of designing a structure with this material. We chose an emergency shelter as our design goal because we decided that an emergency shelter composed of hypar modules could be constructed from straight-line segments of this unique, extruded material.Saliklis, EP.; Arens, RM. (2010). Rapidly assemled emergency shelters made from "green" materials. Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/694

Finite Element Corroboration of Buckling Phenomena Observed in Corrugated Boxes1

Conventional compression strength formulas for corrugated fiberboard boxes are limited to geometry and material that produce an elastic postbuckling failure.Inelastic postbuckling can occur in squatty boxes and trays, but a mechanistic rationale for unifying observed strength data is lacking. This study combines a finite element model with a parametric design of the geometry and material characteristics affecting the critical buckling stress of box panels to examine their postbuckling response. The finite element model enables a broad scope of simulated panels to be examined economically. Results lead to a postbuckling model fit to the predictions and a better understanding of how to unify elastic and inelastic failure data from actual experiments and form a more general box strength formula

Investigating the Buckling Behavior of OSB Panels

A fully nonlinear finite element buckling analysis, incorporating geometric and material nonlinearities, was conducted on oriented strandboard (OSB) panels. A much simpler finite element eigenbuckling analysis was also conducted. An interesting intermediate approach was then investigated, that is an eigenbuckling analysis of initially imperfect plates. It was found that the eigenbuckling analysis provided good insight into the physical behavior of the panels and predicted the buckling loads of OSB panels within 20% of the experimentally obtained values, yet required significantly less modeling effort than did the fully nonlinear analysis. We propose this as a practical means of establishing the buckling loads of simply supported OSB panels. A number of issues regarding the initially imperfect shape of the panel were explored and are discussed herein

Four Research Projects, One “Green” Theme

The purpose of this paper is to suggest ways that faculty can motivate students to do research through the timely and important issue of sustainable or “green” materials in architectural engineering. This paper will briefly describe four research projects undertaken by seniors in our architectural engineering department. Following these descriptions will be a series of pros and cons that the author has detected while mentoring these projects. Suggestions for best practices will then be presented as well as a discussion of how we assessed these projects. Finally, one of the research projects will be highlighted, with the goal of demonstrating how the student was motivated, and how the project was guided

Putting a Fence Around Architectural Engineering Undergraduate Research Projects

The purpose of this paper is to provide practical suggestions of how to design and most importantly, how to limit the scope of proposed projects such that that an architectural engineering student can successfully participate in undergraduate research. Throughout the paper, the pedagogical benefits of such research projects will be emphasized. This paper will provide ideas and encouragement to faculty who may be hesitant to undertake research with undergraduate students. The paper closes with several successful case studies