About TAS project

Introduction

With a total funding of 200 000 EURO from the European Leonardo Program and a budget of 600000 EURO, Skanaluminium, the association for the aluminium industry in Scandinavia (see www.aluminium.no) contracted a 3 year project (1996-1999) of offering vocational and life long training courses to European engineers in aluminium alloy structural design by means of open distance learning.

Background

Related to cost, weight reduction, quality and new environmental standards, aluminium civil structures (bridges, roof structures, removable buildings) and transport structures (automotive, rail, ship), is more often selected instead of the traditional solutions based on steel. These new market areas for aluminium application meet an increasing demand for new knowledge within structural design.
The TALAT training material, which was developed in another EU project, constituted an excellent basis for developing training programs to meet such new demands.

Objectives

- Developing and implementing training courses for life long training of teachers at technical colleges and universities to qualify them for teaching in aluminium application technologies with special emphasis on structural design.
- Integrating aluminium technology to existing curricula regarding materials technology and structural engineering for continuing education.
- Developing and implementing training courses for life long training of structural engineers to make them take the full advantage of aluminium as structural material (instead of copying structures based on steel design tradition).
- Developing an active network between universities, colleges, engineering/building contractors and industry.

The great challenge in the project was related to motivation and availability:

- How do we get teachers/colleges and engineers / enterprises to spend time and money in achieving new competence?
- How can we offer training to industry being time and cost effective combined with high quality training results?

Open and distance learning (ODL)

The use of new technology in combination with traditional methods seems the most appropriate way to distribute the training courses. Examples are:

- Production of lectures on video
- Videoconferencing for interactive contact between lecturer and distant student groups
- Internet (E-mail, WWW) for distributing of tutorials, exercises and learning material
- Internet (News) for group communication
- Other means of ODL have been considered

Content of training modules

Detailed plans for course content were based on market- and training needs analysis and modularised for the different target groups. The course content was made up by modules. The modules were classified as basic, advanced I or advanced II in accordance with the TALAT material.

A course on "Construction in Aluminium" (80h/10 weeks) was given to college teachers in Scandinavia and a course on "Fatigue design" (40h/10weeks) was organised for PhD students, as an example.

Partners

25 different partners from 10 countries participated in the project. The partners comprised 6 universities, 3 colleges, 3 ship yards, 3 aluminium companies, 3 training/research organisations, 1 civil engineering company and 6 aluminium associations.

TAS Results for the TALAT updating

Through WP1 of the TAS project, "Aluminium Structural Design" series (from 2200 to 2700) are largely updated and expanded. This new part represents more or less 700 pages. In these updated lectures and new lectures, the theoretical and practical approaches are largely based on the new Eurocode 9 directive.

In Chapter 2200, lecture "2204 Design philosophy" has been updated by Steinar Lundberg. A particular big work has been done by Torsten Hoglund who had completely renewed lecture 2301 "Design of members" which is accompanied by 29 examples solved with the Mathcad sofware. The lecture 2302 "Design of Joints" initially written by Torsten Hoglund has been updated by Federico Mazzolani. In the new lectures 2405 and 2406, Dimitris Kosteas explains the latest developments concerning "Fatigue and Fracture in Aluminium Structure". Lectures 2501 to 2504 related to "Design for Fire Resistance" has been all updated. Finally, several "Design examples" directly based on the new Eurocode 9 complete chapter 2700:

2710 Static Design Example
2711 Design of a helicopter deck
2712 Design Example in Fatigue
2713 Fire Design Example

Henceforth, the "Aluminium Structural Design" part of the TALAT CD-ROM is very complete and the TALAT CD-ROM is probably the most efficient tool to transfer the aluminium designing knowledge according to the new Eurocode 9 Directive.

Background - Brief content description - Full table of content (PDF document)
About TAS project - About Partners - For more info - Copyright and liability - TALAT CD-ROM