Homeworks
The 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 the laboratory. You can find the homeworks and the solutions here.
Organization of the course
This year we'll have 13 classes, starting February 26th, two of these classes will be tutorial sessions (the first one on Thursday March 14th, the second one on Thursday March 28th)
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 the (see below) final workshop.
At the end of the course (mid April) we will have a common workshop with the teachers of Computational Mechanics where you will study, under our direction, an interesting structural problem and will submit a technical report that will contribute to your final mark. The workshop and the report are strictly requested to be admitted to the final exam.
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
Please understand that the
slides , etc, are not a substitute for a
real textbook.
[1] Other classroom materials means, mostly, small computer programs.
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 & Software
Most homework problems 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 .