I have been involved with the University of Pittsburgh Department of Civil Engineering Senior Design program for thirty years, including many serving as its coordinator. Offered in their last semester, Senior Design is the capstone course for our graduating Civil and Environmental Engineers, an opportunity for them to synthesize their academic learning into implementation of a significant “near-real-world” team design project and demonstrate their readiness to function as engineers-in-training in the real world.
This Fall’s program was abnormally small, only nineteen students (next semester we have over sixty students registered!). As a consequence, they fielded five small teams, each of which turned in an outstanding performance. Each team was matched with a current real-world challenge and an industry mentor with sufficient information to define the problem and judgment to provide direction to their work. The product of their efforts was a rigorous final engineering report documenting their work and a live presentation in a “town meeting” format to communicate it to a broad audience. Three decades ago we worried about the ability of our graduates to communicate to non-technical audiences; the students these days are better in that aspect than most mid-range professionals.
The first project dealt with a portion of the Active Transportation Plan for Collier Township, a program very similar to the one implemented in Bridgeville in 2022. These plans are local versions of PennDOT’s 2019 Active Transportation Initiative, whose vision was “Biking and walking are integral elements of Pennsylvania’s transportation system that contribute to community health, economic mobility, and quality of life.” The team’s specific challenge was to upgrade Hilltop Road, providing an artery that encourages bicycling and walking. Their final design required moving one mile of Hilltop Road transversely five feet and adding two bicycle lanes and a sidewalk, all for the cost of $2,300,000. Their work was well documented and appeared to me to be of equivalent quality to that of the consulting firm that produced Bridgeville’s plan. I am a proponent of this concept and the PennDOT Initiative and an advocate of any community that attempts to improve cycling and pedestrian mobility. I was impressed that the President of the local Home-Owners Association attended the final presentation and was complimentary of the students’ work. How’s that for real world!
The second project dealt with an actual PennDOT project, the replacement of a deficient bridge over Raccoon Creek in Burgettstown. At first glance this is not a particularly challenging project – a two-lane bridge spanning fifty feet and carrying three hundred vehicles per day, costing $1,300,000. It does however provide an excellent opportunity to do a comprehensive, detailed design of a real bridge. Their design utilizes four steel girders to support a concrete deck. This team did indeed replicate the entire design and construction process for this bridge. Based on their live presentation and a cursory review of their final report, it is obvious to me that the four students on this team have all the qualifications to immediately function as engineers-in-training for a transportation department or a firm designing or constructing highway bridges.
Team Three’s project was the design of a new waste-water pump station in Oakdale. The existing system currently feeds into the the Allegheny County Sanitary Authority (ALCOSAN) network, but significant population growth in the region has rendered the pump station obsolete. The team performed structural and geotechnical design for three buildings – the pump station itself, a warehouse, and a control building. I was impressed that each building was custom designed from a different material, especially since the control building was a masonry structure. The versatility of the structural team was indeed impressive. I was not as impressed with their ability to communicate graphically what they had designed. I would have gladly traded all the detail of their finite element analysis for old fashioned, properly dimensioned general arrangement drawings of each of the three buildings. Total project cost was about ten million dollars.
The fourth project was also based on a real world ALCOSAN project. As part of the Consent Decree for their Combined Sewer Runoff problem, ALCOSAN is required to double the capacity of the Woods Run treatment plant. This includes the necessity to add sedimentation basin capacity. Sedimentation is the second step in waste-water treatment; the stage in which suspended material is provided enough residence time to permit it to settle out and be removed as sludge. This team did an excellent job of implementing the design process from initial requirements to a detailed final design, while also carefully considering alternative approaches, including several that would significantly increase sedimentation efficiency without increasing the volume of the basins. Their ingenuity in pursuing alternatives was refreshing.
Team Five replicated a real-world project, the replacement of a massive underground clear-well tank at the Pittsburgh Water Authority Aspinwall water treatment facility. The forty-four million gallons capacity concrete clear-well is about twenty-five feet deep with a footprint of about five acres, and has a concrete base, walls, roof, and support columns. The addition of above ground reservoirs has eliminated the necessity for this massive storage volume at Aspinwall. The proposed design consists of a small ultra-violet disinfection system feeding four two-million-gallon cells, operated in parallel. The team envisions constructing the cells on the floor of the old clear-well, once the rest of it has been demolished. The total project cost is about ninety million dollars, including twenty-six million for demolition. This team also did an excellent job of communicating the results of their work, in both their live presentation and their final report.
My review of these five projects has reinforced my opinion that the Pitt Civil Engineering Department is continuing to do a masterful job of educating young men and women to function as real-world engineers. Senior Design program coordinator Dr. Ogul Doygun and his faculty colleagues are especially commended for providing this opportunity for the students to display their accomplishments.