Teaching

Undergraduate Courses

CEE 353 – Engineering Materials

CEE 353 covers the fundamentals and applications of civil engineering materials with an emphasis on the relationships between processing, microstructure, and material properties. The course provides students with the tools to choose materials for specific applications. Emphasis is placed on materials such as portland cement concrete, asphalt concrete, steel, and composite materials which are widely used in the built infrastructure.

CEE 421: Concrete Structures

 This course covers the design of reinforced concrete structural elements such as beams, slabs, and columns to meet ACI 318 code requirements. Analysis of reinforced concrete structural elements and their design is covered. The course objectives are: (i) To make students aware of the principles in structural concrete design methods, (ii) To enable students use fundamental principles of engineering mechanics to reinforced concrete design, (iii) To enable the application of principles learned to real engineering design.

Graduate Courses

CEE 515: Properties of Concrete

This course explores the materials science aspects of the properties and behavior of Portland Cement Concrete, including the properties of raw materials in concrete such as cement, aggregates, mineral and chemical admixtures, and fibers.  Topic include: physical and chemical aspects of cement hydration and the role of binder types, the influence of type and morphology of hydrates, the pore and microstructure of concretes, proportioning concrete mixtures, fresh and hardened concrete properties, introduction to fracture behavior of concrete, and concrete durability issues such as freezing and thawing, sulfate attack, and corrosion of reinforcing steel. Special concretes will also be introduced.

CEE 598: Structural Damage, Evaluation, and Strengthening

The subject area of structural damage, evaluation, and strengthening is very vast and varied, that there are no unified theories or mechanisms.  This course is intended to provide you with an understanding of the basic mechanisms of structural damage (external load induced as well as materials related), related assessment methods, strengthening strategies, and to give you the tools necessary to arrive at informed decisions.  The topics covered in this class are from a variety of sources and there is no single comprehensive source of information.

CEE 598: Microstructure and Mechanics of Infrastructural Composites

This course is designed to introduce graduate students in the area of infrastructural materials and mechanics to the underlying concepts that relate a material’s microstructure to its properties. These composites could be random and heterogeneous such as concrete and asphalt, or oriented such as in fiber reinforced composites and textile fiber reinforced concrete. The course introduces the fundamental concepts with respect to packing and space filling in volumes, and stereology and mathematical morphology to characterize the spatial microstructure of these composite materials including methodologies to obtain critical dimensions that are important in property predictions. Effective media theories to predict the mechanical, electrical, and transport performance and cross-property relationships will be explored.  Failure theories for these random and oriented composite materials, the influence of phase fractions and their distribution including the porosity, stochastic treatment of random heterogeneous composites, and fracture mechanics of the composites will be covered.   Of particular interest are the areas where the constitutive mechanical properties and microstructure interact.