Forensic Structural Engineering in education

Forensic Structural Engineering is the professional practice of determining the cause(s) of a structural failure, often with the aim to lay out a technical basis to identify the responsible parties for a failure. Although Forensic Structural Engineering is given as course at several universities in USA and UK, at many institutions it is no common practice to include it in the civil engineering curricula. At TU Delft a graduate course has been initiated for building and structural engineering students, starting from September 2015. The course needs to meet a two-fold aim: 1. To understand and explain important structural failure mechanisms in various materials 2. To come up with design measures to avoid these problems This paper describes how this course was successfully implemented in the civil engineering curriculum