Focus Area: Structures

Structural engineering is a multidisciplinary subject spanning the disciplines of civil engineering, aerospace engineering, mechanical engineering, and marine engineering. In all these disciplines, structural engineers use common materials used, create analyses using the same general principles of structural mechanics, and design using the same overall philosophy and criteria. There are surprisingly small differences in the basic principles that guide the design of a high-rise building and an ocean cruiser. Similarly, the analysis of a high rise building subjected to earthquake forces is practically identical to that used in the analysis and design of a passive or active suspension of an advanced automobile! Thus, whereas Structural Engineering resides within the Civil Engineering Program of the Colorado School of Mines, the teaching and research on the subject follow a holistic approach/system approach, that includes, the integration of the principles of mechanics, material science, computational methods, sensing technologies, experimental techniques, and graphics.

Masonry Arch

Faculty within the structural engineering research group at the Colorado School of Mines offer Masters and Doctoral thesis research topics with considerable breadth and depth that includes concrete engineering, earthquake engineering, structural controls, soil-structure interaction and dynamic analysis, composite structures, advanced laboratory testing and field instrumentation, materials constitutive modeling, finite element and discrete element modeling using high performance computers.

Structural Engineering Faculty
J. Berger
P. D. Kiousis
G. Mustoe
J. Wang
R. Zhang