Structural Engineering

Spatial correlation in ground motion intensities: Measurement, prediction, and seismic risk implications

February 06, 2023 - 12:00 pm

Speaker: Jack W. Baker

The amplitude of ground shaking during an earthquake varies spatially, due to location-to-location differences in wave propagation, attenuation, and source- and site-effects. These variations have important implications for impacts to infrastructure systems and other distributed assets. This presentation will provide an overview of efforts to quantify spatial correlations in amplitudes, via past earthquakes and numerical simulations.

The Role of Emerging Technologies To Realize Smart Infrastructure

February 01, 2023 - 12:00 pm

Speaker: Professor Kenichi Soga

Design, construction, maintenance and upgrading of civil engineering infrastructure requires fresh thinking to minimize use of materials, energy and labor. This can only be achieved by understanding the actual performance of the infrastructure, both during its construction and throughout its design life, through innovative monitoring. Advances in sensor systems and data analytics offer intriguing possibilities to radically alter methods of condition assessment and monitoring of infrastructure.

Multi-scale Computational Geomechanics for Energy and Climate

January 25, 2023 - 12:00 pm

Speaker: Chloé Arson

Landscapes encode the history of the climate. For example, saprolite, the intermediate material  between rock and soil, plays a critical role in the evolution of topography, nutrient supply,  landslide hazards, and the global carbon cycle. The subsurface also bears resources used for the  production of energy and construction materials. It is thus important to assess the response of soils,  rocks and other geomaterials to a varying climate and to increasing societal demands.

Building Big Underground – Modern Challenges in meeting the demands of expanding the Urban Environment

January 18, 2023 - 12:00 pm

Speaker: Luis Piek

The share of the world’s population living in cities is expected to rise to 80% by 2050. To meet the current and future transportation demands while minimizing disturbance to existing infrastructure, City municipalities are expanding their subterranean networks, requiring longer, larger, and more extensive underground networks. Additional challenges include crossing active faults, meeting high seismic demands, and large excavations adjacent to tall buildings and their interaction with existing and future tunnels.

What We Learned from Parallel Linear and Non-linear Analyses

January 11, 2023 - 12:00 pm

Speaker: Ariel Creagh

When designing a structure, a critical decision is whether the lateral force resisting system will be developed using linear or non-linear analysis techniques. On our new design, laboratory research projects at UCSF, the Technical Performance Criteria requires us to do both analyses in parallel. Can you predict what are the differences in the overall design of the lateral force resisting system depending on which type of analysis is used?

Building Big Underground – Modern Challenges in meeting the demands of expanding the Urban Environment

November 28, 2022 - 12:00 pm

Speaker: Luis Piek

The share of the world’s population living in cities is expected to rise to 80% by 2050. To meet the current and future transportation demands while minimizing disturbance to existing infrastructure, City municipalities are expanding their subterranean networks, requiring longer, larger, and more extensive underground networks. Additional challenges include crossing active faults, meeting high seismic demands, and large excavations adjacent to tall buildings and their interaction with existing and future tunnels.

A Smart Train Concept for High-Speed Ultrasonic Monitoring of Railroad Tracks

November 21, 2022 - 12:00 pm

Speaker: Diptojit Datta

Every year, the railroad industry transports over 10,000 billion freight ton-kilometers and 3000 billion passenger-kilometers around the world. Internal defects in rails and degrading ballast support conditions for railroad ties are some of the major causes of train derailment related accidents. Timely detection of such defects is of critical interest to the railroad maintenance community for ensuring the reliability of the railroad infrastructure.

Construction Disputes and Structural Failures: In-depth Technical Investigations for Providing Answers

November 16, 2022 - 12:00 pm

Speaker: Jeffrey Hunt & Joaquin Marquez

Structural failures and disputes on construction projects often leave owners, engineers, contractors, and the general public questioning “How?”, “Why?”, and “What went wrong?” Answering these questions requires detective work, technical analyses, and engineering insight. In this talk, the presenters introduce the world of forensic engineering and consulting. Case studies of a couple of recent projects will be discussed, including those that involve claimed design errors/omissions, defects, and
construction sequencing issues.

Enabling the Mass Timber Revolution: Resilience, Sustainability, and Technology

November 09, 2022 - 12:00 pm

Speaker: John W. van de Lindt

As we move through the decades since three seminal earthquakes between 1989 and 1995 occurred there has been a mega-shift toward resilience and sustainability, and the shared-use facilities within NEES and NHERI have been truly integral to this still-accelerating story; included here will be the evolution of the wood building as an illustrative example.  This talk will take you back 25 years beginning in the 1990’s with woodframe research and on to performance-based seismic design of taller wood buildings.

Base Isolation of an Existing Building and Unique “Hashtag” Science Building

November 07, 2022 - 12:00 pm

Speaker: Matt Skokan, Ph.D., S.E and Nofel Teldjoune, P.E. Saiful Bouquet Structural Engineers

This seminar will focus on the technical aspects of two challenging projects currently being designed at Saiful Bouquet, including one new building and one retrofit of an existing building:

1. Base Isolation of an Existing Building
2. Unique “Hashtag” Science Building