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Anne Raich, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, is bringing an innovative research opportunity to Lafayette students that will also help future architects and engineers think outside the skyscraper.
She just completed the transfer of a $256,060 Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) from Texas A&M University to Lafayette.
The CAREER Award is one of NSF’s most prestigious awards honoring teacher-scholars who most effectively integrate education and research in accordance with the mission of their institution. The grant is being used to develop a conceptual design system that allows for more creativity in structural design. Such a system will help architects and engineers collaborate more effectively to create alternative, customary structures to meet more societal needs.
“In practice, architects and engineers are often asked to look beyond traditional structural forms and design innovative structural systems,” Raich explains. “To aid in designing efficient, non-routine structures, professionals would benefit greatly from any process that significantly broadened their exploration of conceptual design alternatives, since conceptual design provides the best opportunity to propose efficient solutions to complex problems.
“Typically, designers use a trial and error process and the quality of the design alternatives they come up with relies solely on the designer’s experience,” she continues. “Plus, there are actually two designers: the architect and the engineer, and each are focused on satisfying their own objectives and constraints.”
The architect’s objectives, according to Raich, involve aesthetic quality while the engineer is concerned with safety, serviceability, and constructability.
“The trial and error design process, in this case, fails to come up with the best design for the both of them since one designer’s set of objectives is optimized before the other’s objectives are even considered,” she says.
Raich is basing the research on the conceptual design of large-scale roof systems.
“Architectural objectives typically dominate the design of large-scale roof systems,” she says. “The structural design is often severely constrained by the roof profile and clear span selected by the architect,” making it an ideal domain to benefit from this research project.
According to Raich, computer programs that offer the potential for helpful diversity of design alternatives are scarce because of the complicated “architectural and structural design criteria, the lack of a model of the human design process, and the difficult task of generating a broad range of design alternatives.”
The first step, then, is to develop, evaluate, and optimize design alternatives that comply with the requirements of both the architect and engineer, according to Raich. Her objectives also include designing features that allow designers to see the tradeoffs of certain design changes, as well as features that help steer the designer toward the most preferred solution. She will then use the expertise of designers in the field of large-scale roof systems to evaluate the quality of the designs that are developed using the program.
“Driven by the advancements made in this research effort,” says Raich, “the conceptual design system will enhance a designer’s ability to design efficient and novel structures and will impact the way designers conceptualize the design process by encouraging the discovery of functional, yet aesthetic designs. Other structural systems, including large-scale bridges, space structures, biomechanical systems, and very large scale integrated (VLSI) layout design could benefit from the development of similar conceptual design systems in the future.”
According to Raich, students will be involved in the development of computer-based learning modules, which will improve their understanding of intricate design concepts, how different building materials, like steel, behave structurally, and other design courses.
“This is one of the educational objectives of the project,” Raich explains. “The virtual design experimentation modules will help identify which designs are successful and which are not and support the subsequent investigation of the successful designs. The intent is to lead students through a series of expectation failures to induce further experimentation with different ideas. Students will be involved in identifying module content, scope and creation of experimental scenarios. They will then develop the modules themselves using Macromedia Flash.”
This summer, Hasegan worked with Raich on the computer program to increase the consideration of multiple user preferences and other conceptual design criteria.
“Diana was involved hands-on with implementing changes to the computer model used by the design program, primarily in the neural network and genetic algorithm processes,” Raich explains. “She also helped to assess the impact of these changes on the overall performance of the method and on the quality of the designs obtained.”
Seniors finish the civil engineering curriculum with a capstone Design III course in which they design their own credible engineering project using skills acquired from previous design courses. Raich plans to add components to the course that will involve professional engineers identifying and introducing a project to the students and mentoring them through the design process.
Raich joined the faculty in 2005 and has since mentored numerous students in EXCEL and independent study research. These include mechanical engineering major Tabor Pearson ’09 (Coronado, Calif.), civil engineering major Denila Deliallisi ’09 (Tirana, Albania), and civil engineering graduate Greg Black ’07.
She has published and presented research in numerous academic journals and conferences, and has worked and researched as a professional engineering scientist for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, U.S. Army Construction Engineering Research Laboratory, and Carnegie Mellon University. She has served on the Emerging Computer Technology Committee and Structural Optimization Committee of the American Society for Civil Engineers since 2004 and was honored with the prestigious PFSMETE Postdoctoral Fellowship from the NSF in 1998.
Raich received her Ph.D. in civil engineering from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a master’s in civil engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, and her bachelor’s in civil engineering from West Virginia University where she graduated Suma Cum Laude with honors.