The optional courses allow the student to complete his/her own study program and to characterize his/her own training profile choosing, according to his/her own personal interests, the themes of deepening among a wide range of alternatives.

According to the Dublin Descriptors (DdD), passing the exam certifies the acquisition of the following results:

DdD 1 (knowledge and understanding), 3 (autonomy of judgment), 4 (communication skills) and 5 (learning ability)

- ability to acquire, process independently and communicate knowledge not strictly related to the subjects characterizing the Master Program (DdD 1, 3, 4 and 5)

The course deals with structural materials and systems which are not usually covered in the basic courses of "Strength of Materials" and "Structural Engineering", such as timber structures, in particular Glulam and Xlam, structural glass, three-dimensional trusses and grid structures, cable-nets and tensile fabric structures. The course attempts to provide the mechanical basis for the understanding of the structural behaviour of the systems in point and of the main design principles and practices (even under seismic excitation) relevant to them. Some notions of computational mechanics are also given in order to enable the students to use  commercial structural analysis codes to simulate the behaviour of some of the considered structures. During the course, some simple mechanical tests will be developed on small timber elements, and examples with didactical models of beam structures will be discussed.

More specifically the topics covered in the course are:

1. Structural glued laminated timber (glulam). Mechanical properties of wood. Fabrication of glulams. Various types of glulam beams and frames. Connections, joints. Design of glulam members (straight beams, tapered and curved beams, columns) and of simple structural systems. Cross laminated timber (CLT) and CLT building systems. Timber grid-shell structures. Seismic behaviour of timber buildings

2. Structural glass. Chemical physical Properties and types of glass. Laminated and tempered glass. Glass facades, construction details, cable-net supported facades. Structural glass beams and fins.

3. Three-dimensional trusses and grids. Structural types, types of nodes, analysis examples, examples of realized projects.

4. Tensile structures (cable-nets and membrane structures). Behaviour of cables, cable-nets and tensile membranes; types of cable-nets and membrane structures; introduction to form-finding methods (force density method); mechanical characteristics of the coated fabrics used as membranes. ETFE cushion systems. Role of pretensioning and prestress.

5. Some notions of computational methods for structural analysis; use of commercial codes to analyze simple structures (trusses, beams, frames, etc.).

At the end of the course students are divided into groups. Each group is invited to investigate a research topic of interest (among those dealt with during the course) under the supervision of the teacher on the basis of a few scientific papers, and to develop an oral presentation on it.  During the course, the last lessons will be devoted to review the research of the groups and help groups to prepare the presentation paying attention to contents and scientific communication strategies. Moreover, at the end of the oral presetation, the students will have to answer to a few questions on the monographic part of the course, and, included in the presentation, to discuss a few exercises on simple beam structures developed by the software introduced during the course.  For any problem and for the exam preparation, students can contact the teacher and ask for additional explanations.