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Workshops & Presentations
Structural Seminar at SDSU
The Mountain-Plains Consortium and the Federal Highway Administration sponsored the 31st Annual Structural Seminar at South Dakota State University Nov. 16. The "FHWA Self Consolidating Concrete Workshop" was intended for DOT engineers, structural engineers, civil engineers, architects, material testing technicians, concrete producers, building officials, specification writers and students.
The day-long event included information from FHWA specialists, university researchers, and private industry experts. There has been some reluctance in the engineering community to use self consolidating concrete because it is a relatively new product and information on the production, testing and performance of it is not widely known. The seminar was designed to present and discuss development, applications, proportioning, testing and economic impacts of self consolidating concrete.
Tech Transfer Bridge Workshop at CSU
A technology transfer workshop on composite wood-concrete technologies for short-to-medium span bridges was held Aug. 15 at Colorado State University. The workshop was sponsored by the MPC and the CSU Department of Civil Engineering.
The one-day program featured an overview of composite wood-concrete layered systems and an overview of their applications in Europe, Brazil, and Portugal. CSU faculty and several faculty members from European institutions involved in research applications of composite wood-concrete bridges made presentations at the workshop. Attendees also reviewed research at CSU and toured laboratories conducting related research projects. The audience included county engineers, road and bridge coordinators, public works directors from small urban and rural areas and municipalities in Colorado. The program was organized by the MPC program director at CSU, Richard Gutkowski.
Shear Spike Research Presented
Colorado State University civil engineering professor Richard Gutkowski presented a technical paper, "Shear Spike Repair of Timber Railroad Bridge Chord Members" at the conference, Responding to Tomorrow's Challenges in Structural Engineering. The event was Sept. 13-15 in Budapest, Hungary and was organized by the International Association of Bridge and Structural Engineers. A written paper, co-authored with Travis Burgers (former M.S. student) and colleagues Jen Balogh and Don Radford, was published in the Proceedings of the conference. The paper detailed a recently completed phase of research sponsored by MPC.
University of Utah offers Web-Based Videoconferences
The University of Utah offered two web-based videoconferences for students and DOT professionals. The courses, "Technical Writing and Presenting for Professional Engineers" and "Statistics Made Easy," were each two and half days long and were conducted by Peter Martin, University of Utah professor and director of the Utah Traffic Lab.
The writing and presenting course is aimed at engineers, technicians and government staff and established the fundamentals of effective technical writing and technical communication through a variety of media.
The statistics course explained the fundamentals of statistical analysis in a practical way, providing insight into the correct application of basic statistical tools and providing confidence for future use.
Looking at European Universities
The MPC was one of the sponsors of a guest lecture at Colorado State University, Oct. 20. The lecture, "University Educational Programs in the European Union Community was given by György Farkas, head of the Structural Engineering Department at Budapest University of Technology and Economics.
Farkas is a frequent collaborator with faculty in the CSU Department of Civil Engineering, particularly Richard Gutkowski, the MPC program director at CSU.
The lecture outlined the primary provisions of the 1999 Bologna Treaty adopted by the European Union to harmonize European Higher Education among its 25 member states. The treaty established uniform degree structures at universities, facilitating free interstate movement of students and educators. Farkas discussed the broad changes that the treaty is prompting at universities across Europe, with a particular focus on the impact at Budapest University.
Farcas was in Colorado as part of a commemoration of events planned by the Hungarian Club of Colorado to mark the 50th Anniversary of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution.
