Course Description
CES4605C is the structural steel design course in a Florida civil engineering degree. The Statewide Course Numbering System titles it Structural Steel Design and defines it tersely as "design of steel structural members. Built-up members." The C suffix marks an integrated lecture-and-laboratory course.
This is the point in the degree where a student stops analysing a given structure and starts choosing one. Analysis has a single correct answer; design does not. The course teaches selection against a code — sizing a beam, a column, a beam-column and a connection so that the member is adequate, economical and constructible, in that order of necessity and roughly the reverse order of how students first weight them.
⚠ One Florida institution carries this exact number: Florida Gulf Coast University, titling it "Steel Design" at 3 credits. Eight other Florida public universities teach the same subject as CES4605, without the C — see the offering notes below, because that is the arrangement most students will actually encounter.
Learning Outcomes
Required Outcomes
- Describe the structural properties of steel — stress-strain behaviour, yield and ultimate strength, ductility, residual stresses — and name the common ASTM grades and where each is used.
- Read the AISC Steel Construction Manual fluently: shape tables, design aids, and the specification itself.
- Determine design loads and apply ASCE 7 load combinations, distinguishing LRFD from ASD and working correctly in whichever the course adopts.
- Design and check tension members for yielding on the gross section, rupture on the net section, block shear and slenderness, including shear lag effects.
- Design and check compression members for flexural buckling, including effective length factors, and address local buckling of the cross-section elements.
- Design and check flexural members for yielding, lateral-torsional buckling and local buckling, using the moment capacity curve as a function of unbraced length.
- Check beams for shear and for deflection under service loads, and recognise when serviceability rather than strength governs.
- Design beam-columns using the AISC interaction equations.
- Design bolted connections — bearing-type and slip-critical — checking bolt shear, bearing, tearout and block shear.
- Design welded connections, including fillet weld sizing, and interpret standard welding symbols.
- Design simple beam-to-column shear connections and base plates.
- Justify a design decision in writing, including why alternatives were rejected, and produce a clear calculation package.
Optional Outcomes
- Design composite steel-concrete beams with shear studs.
- Design built-up plate girders including stiffeners and web design.
- Design moment-resisting connections.
- Design a complete steel building frame or roof structure as a term project.
- Address wind and seismic lateral systems: braced frames, moment frames.
- Introduce fatigue, fracture and connection detailing for cyclic loading.
- Conduct laboratory tests on steel members — tension coupons, bolted connections, beam behaviour — and reconcile results with code predictions.
Major Topics
Required Topics
- Steel as a material — production, ASTM grades (A36, A992, A500, A572), mechanical properties, ductility, corrosion and fire behaviour.
- Design philosophy — LRFD and ASD, limit states, load and resistance factors, reliability, ASCE 7 load combinations.
- Tension members — gross and net area, shear lag, block shear, slenderness limits, design of eyebars and rods.
- Compression members — Euler buckling, inelastic buckling, effective length and the alignment charts, local buckling and element slenderness classification.
- Flexural members — plastic and elastic section modulus, compact and non-compact sections, lateral-torsional buckling, unbraced length, the moment capacity curve.
- Serviceability — deflection limits, vibration, ponding.
- Beam-columns — combined axial and flexural behaviour, second-order effects, moment amplification, the AISC interaction equations.
- Bolted connections — bolt grades, bearing and slip-critical behaviour, shear, tension, prying, tearout and block shear.
- Welded connections — weld types and symbols, fillet weld strength, weld access and the constructability implications.
- Simple connections — shear tabs, angles, base plates.
- Design practice — calculation packages, drawings and communication.
Optional Topics
- Composite construction with shear studs.
- Plate girders and stiffener design.
- Moment connections and rigid frames.
- Lateral force resisting systems for wind and seismic.
- Fatigue and fracture.
- Laboratory testing of steel members and connections.
- A comprehensive design project.
Resources & Tools
- ⚠ The AISC Steel Construction Manual is the course. It is not a supplementary reference — students buy it, bring it to every class, and are examined with it. The current edition includes the Specification for Structural Steel Buildings (AISC 360). Learning to navigate it quickly is itself an assessed skill and a directly employable one.
- Steel Design by William T. Segui is the most widely adopted textbook for this course.
- Structural Steel Design by Jack McCormac and Stephen Csernak is the common alternative.
- Unified Design of Steel Structures by Geschwindner also appears.
- ASCE/SEI 7 for loads and load combinations.
- ⚠ The Florida Building Code governs in this state and amends the international codes for wind. Florida's wind-borne debris regions and High-Velocity Hurricane Zone (Miami-Dade and Broward) provisions exceed the national baseline, and a design that satisfies ASCE 7 generically may not satisfy Florida.
- Software: RISA-3D, SAP2000, ETABS and RAM Structural System are the industry tools; most courses use one for the project component and require hand verification alongside it.
- AWS D1.1 Structural Welding Code — Steel for welding requirements and symbols.
Career Pathways
- Structural Engineer — the direct destination, and the course most employers ask about in an interview for a structural role.
- Civil Engineer (SOC 17-2051).
- Bridge Engineer — steel superstructure design; FDOT and its consultants are steady employers.
- Construction Manager (SOC 11-9021) and Steel Detailer — the connection and constructability content maps directly onto fabrication and erection work.
- Forensic Engineer — post-hurricane structural assessment is recurring work in Florida.
- Florida employers: structural consultancies (Walter P Moore, Thornton Tomasetti, TLC Engineering, Kimley-Horn, BDI), FDOT and its bridge consultants, steel fabricators and erectors statewide, the large general contractors, and the threshold-inspection firms Florida's building code framework requires.
Special Information
Offering Notes — offerings and hours, school by school
| Institution | Its title | Credits | Contact hours |
|---|
| Florida Gulf Coast University | Steel Design | 3 | not published |
Florida Gulf Coast University is a State University System institution. ⚠ The 60 contact hours at the top of this guide are derived — the Florida convention for a 3-credit integrated lecture-and-laboratory course. FGCU does not publish an hour figure.
⚠⚠ Most of Florida teaches this subject as CES4605, without the C
This is the note that matters most for transfer. Eight Florida public universities carry the same subject under the bare number, all at 3 credits:
| Institution | Number | Credits |
|---|
| Florida A&M University | CES4605 | 3 |
| Florida Atlantic University | CES4605 | 3 |
| Florida International University | CES4605 | 3 |
| Florida State University | CES4605 | 3 |
| University of Central Florida | CES4605 ("Steel Structures") | 3 |
| University of Florida | CES4605 | 3 |
| University of South Florida | CES4605 | 3 |
| University of West Florida | CES4605 | 3 |
| Florida Gulf Coast University | CES4605C (this course) | 3 |
The credit value is identical across all nine — a rare and welcome uniformity. What differs is the laboratory. FGCU's C-suffix version carries scheduled laboratory hours; the eight bare-number versions do not.
⚠ Two consequences. Statewide numbering guarantees transfer between institutions offering the same number, and CES4605 and CES4605C are different numbers — so between the two groups the credit is evaluated rather than guaranteed. In practice a structural design course transfers readily, but it is an evaluation. Second, and less obvious: the same three credits buy roughly a third more scheduled time in the C version. Plan the term accordingly, and do not assume the workload matches a friend's at another university.
What the course assumes
The University of Central Florida gates its equivalent on Structural Analysis I and Lab (CES4100C) with a minimum grade of C — a single, unambiguous prerequisite. The course does not re-teach analysis. You will be expected to produce a correct moment diagram for an indeterminate frame and move straight to sizing the member. Students who struggled with moment distribution meet that weakness again here, immediately.
UCF's description also names its code emphasis: "emphasis on AISC-ASD building code; introduction to AISC-LRFD." ⚠ That ordering is worth checking at your own institution, because most modern courses teach LRFD first and treat ASD as the alternative. Both are valid within AISC 360, and practising engineers meet both, but a course built around one will feel different from a course built around the other — and an examination question is unforgiving about which set of factors you used.
Position in the curriculum, the FE exam and licensure
A senior-level design course, following structural analysis and usually taken alongside or near reinforced concrete design. Together those two courses are what a structural employer looks for on a transcript.
Structural design appears on the NCEES Fundamentals of Engineering (Civil) examination, though at a less demanding level than this course reaches. It matters far more for the PE Civil: Structural depth examination and for the separate Structural Engineering (SE) examination. In Florida, licensure runs through the Florida Board of Professional Engineers, which requires the FE, four years of qualifying experience, and the PE examination. ⚠ Florida also has a distinct Special Inspector designation for threshold buildings, which is structural work carrying its own statutory requirements — a licensure pathway that does not exist in most states.
Workload
Budget ten to fourteen hours a week, and expect it to be unevenly distributed if there is a term design project — those concentrate brutally in the final weeks. The distinctive difficulty of this course is not mathematical: it is that design problems are open-ended, and students accustomed to a single correct answer find the ambiguity harder than the calculations. Trial selection, check, and revise is the method. Budget for the iterations.
AI Integration
Steel design is code-driven, and that is exactly why AI assistants are risky here in a way they are not in an analysis course.
Genuinely useful: explaining why a limit state exists and what physically happens when it governs — lateral-torsional buckling is the standard example, and models explain it well; generating practice problems; checking algebra and units; explaining an unfamiliar term in the AISC specification; drafting the narrative of a design report; and writing spreadsheet routines for repeated capacity checks, which is genuine professional practice.
Where they fail, specifically and dangerously:
- Code editions. AISC 360 and ASCE 7 are revised regularly, and equation numbers, factors and even methods change between editions. A model trained on mixed-vintage text will produce a coefficient from one edition inside a procedure from another, and nothing in the output signals it. This is the single most common and most serious failure.
- Mixing LRFD and ASD. The two use different load combinations and different resistance treatments. A generated solution that applies factored loads to an allowable-stress capacity is wrong by a large and unconservative margin, and it reads perfectly normally.
- Table values. Models reproduce plausible section properties from memory. They are frequently close and occasionally wrong. Every property comes from the Manual, not from a chat window.
- Florida specifically. Asked for a wind load, a model will apply the ASCE 7 national baseline. The Florida Building Code amends it, and the High-Velocity Hurricane Zone requirements in Miami-Dade and Broward are stricter still. A national answer is a wrong answer here.
The professional standard this course should install: a design is not finished when a number is produced; it is finished when the number is traced to a code clause in a stated edition. That is what a reviewing engineer checks, what a building official checks, and what a plaintiff's expert checks. Cite the clause. A generated result that cannot be traced to a clause you have read is not usable, and the discipline of tracing it will catch nearly every error listed above.
Professional and legal weight: steel designs are sealed by a licensed engineer who bears personal legal responsibility. Structural failures injure people. The NSPE Code of Ethics requires engineers to hold public safety paramount and to work only within their competence — and competence means being able to defend every number, whatever produced it.
Academic integrity: read your syllabus. Design projects are usually defended orally or in review, which reliably exposes work a student cannot explain.