The Bolted Joints Lab

The key thing about this lab is that it requires students (Masters level) to use real design codes and standards.

These are basically recipe books for designing things in industry - so using them provides students with valuable experience of things they will likely be doing soon after graduation.

In this lab students must conduct codified engineering calculations on a selection of bolted connections, before doing tensile tests on those connections.

They gain valuable experience analysing the failure modes of each joint, and learning how safety factors are built into the design process.

These same calculation procedures are used to make real functioning engineering structures.

Emphasising how this links to the real-world applications carries a lot of value in engaging and motivating the students.