Crushing It

A towering 18-foot device lets students push steel and concrete to their breaking points for real-world learning.

 By Joe Tougas ’86

In buildings and bridges, occupants and travelers rely on the strength of steel beams and reinforced concrete to live and move safely.

Civil engineering students at Minnesota State University, Mankato now have access to a towering new tool that puts steel and concrete to the test.

It’s called a force load analyzer—a iron structure that stands 18 feet high in a Trafton East lab and is designed to push steel and concrete beams to their bending, breaking or failure points.

“I think that’s something that will set us apart,” said Civil Engineering Professor Farhad Reza, who has taught in the department for 15 years.

Securing this piece of equipment is a major asset for the Civil Engineering department, as it gives all students—including undergraduates—a hands-on way to test structural integrity and other engineering concepts.

“We can actually simulate the type of behavior that’s being seen in those real-world structures,” Reza said.

The simulation is performed through a cylinder that descends from the top of the load analyzer onto the beams, replicating the weight of traffic on a bridge, for example. The device takes the topic from conceptual and abstract to directly observable.

“There are different ways you can put a load on material,” Reza explained. “You can pull on a material and stretch it—we call that tension. You can push or squeeze a material—that’s compression. But when it comes to bending, we’re taking those concepts of compression and tension, putting them together in an abstract way, and saying, ‘This is how the structure will behave.’ Students learn a lot better when they have that hands-on practical application and can see it first-hand.”

The $753,000 machine was formally launched at an open house celebration on Feb. 25, where alumni, supporters, students and faculty gathered to watch an I-beam bend slightly under more than 20,000 pounds of pressure applied by the analyzer.

At the event, Pieter deHart, associate provost for research and dean of Graduate Studies at MSU, said the force load analyzer represents an exciting milestone for the department and will have purposes beyond the classroom.

In addition to giving students the chance to move from theory to application, he said, the machine “will also strengthen our applied research efforts and deepen our partnerships with local and regional industry—supporting projects, testing and collaborations that directly contribute to our community and workforce needs.”