This past week has been particularly busy for me. Despite losing a full week of school and being forced to function remotely, the graduating Seniors in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at Pitt were required to complete all their final assignments this week and take their final exams next week.
The most significant of these challenges is the completion of their Senior Design Projects. In their final semester our students are required to participate in a significant “near-real-world” team design project. Before my retirement it was my responsibility to coordinate this program. This term I volunteered to mentor one team; I greatly enjoyed my involvement with them.
Normally the program ends with an impressive, day-long colloquium before a large audience in the O’Hara Student Center Ballroom. It indeed is a “big deal”, the culmination of our students’ academic career. Once it became obvious this could not occur, we decided to have each team make its presentation remotely via teleconference with a handful of interested faculty members as its audience.
Consequently I participated in seven one-hour-long teleconferences last week, plus a handful of preliminary dry-runs. I was not surprised to see this group of students make the transition to remote communication so flawlessly. I was, however,
pleasantly surprised that the quality of their design work was not compromised.
Three of the seven projects this term were based on actual projects in the University’s Master Campus Plan. Part of the Plan for the sports complex on the Upper Campus is the design and construction of a 3,500 seat arena for wrestling, volleyball, and gymnastics, to be located adjacent to the Peterson Event Center.
This location is at the east end of the bowl left when Pitt Stadium was demolished. The team I mentored was given the assignment of performing a preliminary design for such a facility, accompanied by an estimate of its cost and a construction plan to confirm its constructability. This was an ambitious challenge, even for one of the strongest teams in the program.
Before the disruption I was sure the team was capable of meeting this challenge; my confidence was confirmed by their presentation. Even though each student was communicating remotely from a different location, their explanation of the results of their work went seamlessly, just as if they were all together in O’Hara Student Center.
Another Master Plan project is the renovation of Crawford Hall, a five-story building that is the home of the University’s neuroscience department. Filled with laboratories, it is imperative that this work be done in logical stages, without significantly disrupting the department’s operations.
This project was particularly interesting to me, as I had experienced a similar staged renovation in Benedum Hall about ten years ago. The team implementing this Senior Design Project was made up of Construction Management students; the plan they produced was highly professional and completely credible.
Stormwater management and Allegheny County’s combined sewer overflow problems are major infrastructure subjects for Civil and Environmental Engineers. One of our teams, composed of Environmental Engineering students, elected to evaluate stormwater mitigation efforts for two projects in the Master Plan – the Redevelopment of Bouquet Gardens and the conversion of O’Hara Street into a pedestrian-friendly “Complete Street”.
A combination of ‘green roofs” and underground storage was shown to significantly reduce peak stormwater runoff at Bouquet Gardens. A similar effect was found for the addition of infiltration planters between sidewalks and bike lanes on O’Hara Street. Though both are relatively small projects, they clearly quantify the effectiveness of “green solutions” to the combined sewer overflow problem.
In the same vein, another team studied the frequent flash flooding problem in downtown Springdale. Their solution is to capture stormwater before it enters the combined sewer system and store it in large underground containers, to be released after the peak of the storm has passed. In this case, a “grey” solution turned out to be more effective than the alternative “green solution”, an extensive rain garden.
When the new terminal is constructed at the Pittsburgh International Airport, the existing landside terminal is scheduled for demolition. Some folks at the Allegheny County Airport Authority are interested in alternative uses for the facility. One of our teams elected to take on this challenge; they came up with a credible recommendation.
Their plan is to convert the landside terminal into a transportation hub linking busy corridors in all four directions. This they would do by retaining the central core of the existing building while demolishing its wings. Attractive glass curtain walls would be installed at both ends. This is a clever solution, including a pair of environmentally friendly alternatives –rain gardens to handle stormwater runoff, and a geothermal heating system as an energy source.
Another innovative project is the development of an urban agriculture system in an empty industrial building in Sharpsburg. A team composed of Environmental Engineers conceived an impressive facility including fish tanks, hydroponics, and a conventional greenhouse. Collecting rainwater for process water, generating electricity with solar panels, and capturing nutrients from waste in a closed system produce a cost-effective solution while providing the community with fresh food.
The final project is an excellent solution to the problem of providing rapidly deployable multi-family housing units for communities hit by natural disasters. This team designed a three-story modular housing unit that could be constructed in large assemblies in a manufacturing facility environment, transported to the construction site by trucks, and final-assembled in a minimum of time. Their design utilizes engineered forest products – Glulam columns and girders, and cross-laminated timber floors and ceilings.
The combination of the use of sophisticated technology, the social relevance of each of these projects, and the professionalism shown by the presentations is extremely impressive. When you realize that this was achieved despite the biggest disruption any academic program has seen in years, you realize that this group of students is indeed “the cream of the crop”. And kudos to program coordinator John Sebastian!