Organization of the course
This year we'll have 12 or 13 classes (depending on the end of the semester) starting March 10th and two of these classes will be tutorial sessions (the dates of the tutorials will be announced later).
You will receive your final mark after a colloquium
with me (oral exam).
To be admitted to the oral exam you must pass a written
test or submit a well received report on your final
project(see below).
The written test provides that you have 4 hours to work on two or three problems designed to be solved using paper, pen and a hand-held calculator. An interesting fact is that you can use all the written and printed materials you can bring to the examination room…
Following each tutorial you will receive homework problems to solve (possibly working with your colleagues) and hand in. Even if the homeworks have no direct influence on the admission to the oral or on your final mark, they are useful to help you focus your preparation and get ready for either the common Computational Mechanics + Dynamics of Structures project (see below) or the written test.
At the end of the course (mid April) you will be
assigned an individual project, designed to check your
understanding of both Dynamics of Structures and
Computational Mechanics. You will produce a report on
your project and this report will be evaluated, possibly
leading to your admission to the final exam.
If we'll be back to normality then, it is possible that
the work on the project will be started in a common
workshop with the teacher of Computational Mechanics and
me.
The slides I use will be posted here after each class,
as well as solved problems and other classroom materials
[1], if you want to have a look at the
slides before a
class, last year's slides are a
click away[2].
Please understand that the
slides , etc, are not a substitute for a
real textbook.
[1] Other classroom materials means, mostly, small
computer programs.
[2] You can go back for quite a few years of materials
modifying the URL above.
Homeworks
The 2 homeworks are strictly optional and have no direct influence on your final marks. On the other hand, working on them lets you test your understanding of the subject and prepare for either the project or the written test. You can find the homeworks and the solutions here.
Recommended textbooks
- Anil K.Chopra, Dynamics of Structures (Theory and Applications to Earthquake Engineering), 4th ed.
- Ray W. Clough, Joseph Penzien,
Dynamics of Structures.
This classic text is solely sold by the software house linked above. You can find an used copy with a bit of luck.
The course is mostly inspired by Clough and Penzien's book, but for many topics it follows Chopra's approach and examples. Should you prefer to buy a single book, my advice is "Buy Chopra's".
Note that
- former editions of Chopra's book are perfectly OK for my course and can be found at lower prices, both used or new,
- a fair number of copies of Chopra's book (3rd ed.) are available from the Campus Library in Lecco.
Homeworks, Final Project & Software
Most homework problems as well as the final project will require you to plot a time series or to perform some matrix algebra, but most spreadsheets (say Excel or Calc) can do these things.
However it may be simpler to write some computer programs that solve the problems, using Mathematica or MATLAB (or Matlab's free clone Octave) or Python or ... to perform the computations and generate the plots.
Politecnico's students can freely download the proprietary software I mentioned (Excel, Mathematica, MATLAB ) as well as many other proprietary applications and development tools, from a specific Politecnico site. OTOH Calc, Octave, Python etc are Open Source software.
The software examples that I'll discuss in class are in Python (really easy to read even for the inexperienced). To have an idea of the language here it is the solution of a recently assigned problem presented as a notebook, while the software used in tutorials is MATLAB .