The motivation for this research stems from the authors' experience where they have witnessed the challenges students face in grasping certain concepts because of difficulty visualizing the concepts being taught. The research aims to understand how new digital tools can help students overcome these challenges and how to measure their effectiveness. Three applications of building information modeling in Civil Engineering (CE) and Construction Management (CM) education were explored in this research. Two were the creation of knowledge repositories for residential construction and concrete formwork applications, and the third was the use of three dimensional building information models for enhancing student visualization of concrete structure design concepts. An increase of 4.7% for the beam problem, 4.8% for the slab problem, and 4.8% for the foundation and column problem was observed in the number of correct answers from CM students. For CE students, an increase of 10.1% was observed in the number of correct answers for the beam problem when three dimensional building information models were used. This study shows that the use of building information modeling in CE and CM education applications has the potential to be more than a graphic representation tool, but a means to enhance student learning.

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One of the most difficult challenges facing researchers these days is making industrial applications (e.g. engines, automobiles, and aircraft) run on renewable energy and reducing the use of fuel as much as possible. One approach to achieve this goal is the use of smart materials such as piezoelectric materials which produce mechanical stress or strain under the application of an electrical field. Vice versa, if this material is subjected to a mechanical strain, an electrical field will result. Piezoelectric materials are used as sensors or actuators for the structural control of smart structures. In this paper, a mathematical model represented by the governing differential equation for a host plate containing two piezoelectric patches has been developed to predict the displacement of a plate excited by the piezoelectric patches and transverse loads.

a b s t r a c tThis paper presents the extension of a flexibility-based large increment method (LIM) for the case of cyclic loading. In the last few years, LIM has been successfully tested for solving a range of non-linear structural problems involving elastoplastic material models under monotonic loading. In these analyses, the force-based LIM algorithm provided robust solutions and significant computational savings compared to the displacement-based finite element approach by using fewer elements and integration points. Although in cyclic analysis a step-by-step solution procedure has to be adopted to account for the plastic history, LIM will still have many advantages over the traditional finite element method. Before going into the basic idea of this extension, a brief discussion regarding LIM governing equations is presented followed by the proposed solution procedure. Next, the formulation is specified for the treatment of the elastic perfectly plastic beam element. The local stage for the beam behavior is discussed in detail and the required improvement for the LIM methodology is described. Illustrative truss and beam examples are presented for different non-linear material models. The results are compared with those obtained from a standard displacement method and again highlight the potential benefits of the proposed flexibility-based approach.