Wednesday, May 29th 8 am
Engineering Risk Analysis and Decision for Communities Facing Natural Hazards A talk in Four+ Parts
Ross Barry Corotis, Ph.D. P.E., S.E., NAE, F.EMI, F.SEI, Dist.M.ASCE, Denver Business Challenge Professor Emeritus, College of Engineering and Applied Science Dean Emeritus, University of Colorado at Boulder
Abstract: The cost of natural disasters continues to rise around the world, in part because of population growth, urbanization and the pressures they place on land use, and in part because policy makers continue to undervalue natural hazard risk in long-term planning. Yet these hazard are critical to community sustainability, and fundamental to the concept of resilience. The shortcoming in reducing the vulnerability of infrastructure lies partly with engineers and risk professionals, who must be aware of public perceptions of risk and political process rationality, which present inherent incompatibilities. Engineers need to know which measures of risk are most meaningful or relevant to decision makers, and then be able to communicate those risks, and the costs and benefits of mitigation, in concise, credible and meaningful terms. This seminar will discuss four related aspects: approximate reliability methods for community-wide resilience, issues of risk perception, practical rationality of elected officials, and the role for generalized information theory as an alternative to probability.
Biosketch: Ross B. Corotis, NAE, is Professor of Engineering Emeritus at the University of Colorado in Boulder. He researches the coordinated roles of engineering and social science in framing and communicating long-term hazard risks and resiliency for the built environment. With three degrees from MIT, he was on the faculty at Northwestern University, established the Department of Civil Engineering at The Johns Hopkins University, and was Dean of Engineering at CU. He has chaired committees on structural safety for ASCE and ACI and the Executive Committee of IASSAR, served as science advisor for the Department of State in Washington, DC., and was Editor of the journals Structural Safety and ASCE Journal of Engineering Mechanics. For The National Academies he served on the Building Research Board, the Disasters Roundtable, the Board on Infrastructure and the Constructed Environment, chaired the Laboratory Assessment Board, was founding chair of the Committee on NIST Technical Programs, and was Chair of the Civil Engineering Section of the NAE. He is a registered professional engineer and structural engineer, Distinguished Member of ASCE, Fellow of the Structural Engineering and Engineering Mechanics Institutes, recipient of the ASCE Huber, Shinozuka and OPAL Awards, and author of more than 250 publications
Wednesday, May 29th 1:20 pm
Development of resilient and durable construction materials through a robust multiscale mechanistic concept
Oral Buyukozturk, PhD, F. ASCE, F.EMI, F.ACI, F.RSE, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
Abstract: In recent years, developing resilient and durable construction materials for sustainable solutions has become an important engineering field in view of climate change challenges and the need for extending the service life of buildings and infrastructures. In that respect concrete has emerged as the main construction material considering its cost, its flexibility in material design with additives, and its durability and fire performance. However, concrete is a complex material containing various chemical phases introducing challenges in its design as a composite system containing interfaces between these phases as well as interfaces between various embedded components in the system. Classical concrete mechanics may have limitations in meeting these design challenges. In this presentation, we will describe a multiscale approach involving atomistic and molecular dynamics simulations for predicting resiliency of cementitious materials that includes cohesive-frictional interactions between various phases. The approach allows material design for sustainability and durability for cementitious materials with additives. The developed methodology would facilitate appropriate mixture designs that would fit the 3D printing purposes from a fundamental viewpoint for automated construction applications with additives. Additionally, the moisture and temperature related durability simulations will be presented for multi-component systems of fiber reinforced polymer (FRP)/concrete composites, and glass FRP rebars as a replacement of conventional reinforcement in concrete to avoid corrosion problems in infrastructure applications.
Biosketch: Dr. Oral Buyukozturk is George Macomber Professor, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Director of the Laboratory for Infrastructure Science and Sustainability at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His research focuses on safety, sustainability and intelligence of buildings and physical infrastructure. He has made seminal contributions to this field with three interconnected major thrust areas of multiscale mechanics of concrete materials and structures, design of sustainable cement-based construction materials, and infrastructure sensing and novel vision-based monitoring through data analytics and AI in engineering mechanics. He has published more than 430 refereed journal papers and proceedings and supervised/co-authored 14 patents in his field. He has made more than 230 plenary keynote/invited lectures and served the profession through professional societies in different capacities with numerous technical committees, distinctive consulting, services to governments, major conference organization and scientific committee memberships. His work has been recognized through multiple honors and awards including Elected Fellow of the Scotland’s National Academy of Science and Letters; the George W. Housner Structural Control and Monitoring Medal (ASCE-EMI); the Golden Mirko Roš Medal of the Swiss Federal Research Laboratory for Materials Science and Technology (EMPA); the Distinguished Service and Leadership Award (MIT-CEE), ASNT faculty fellowship awards, and Elected Fellows of ASCE, EMI, and ACI.
Thursday, May 30th 8 am
Structural Health Monitoring: From Sensing to Decision Support
Anne S Kiremidjian, Ph.D., NAE, Dist.M.ASCE, Stanford University
Abstract: A comprehensive structural health monitoring system consists of a set of sensors, a wireless communications module, damage diagnosis and prognosis module and information delivery module. Each of these components require to work in a reliable and efficient manner. The system needs to be scalable and easily upgradable. In this presentation, the components of a comprehensive wireless structural health monitoring system will be presented discussing recent developments for each component. While sensors, wireless communications and computational capabilities have significantly advanced reaching a widespread level of acceptance, challenges remain with damage diagnosis and prognosis algorithms. Similarly, robust decision support systems that are versatile and can manage the system while delivering useful information to users are still lacking. The challenges with damage diagnosis and prognosis, and decision support systems will be presented. Impediments to widespread implementation of such systems in practice will be briefly discussed.
Biosketch: Anne Kiremidjian is the C. L. Peck, Class of 1906 Professor in the School of Engineering at Stanford University where she teaches and conducts research on earthquake hazard, risk, and resilience modeling, and structural health monitoring for extreme events. She and her students have developed some of the first seismic hazard maps for California and all countries in Central America except Mexico, time-dependent earthquake occurrence models, dynamics based analytical fragility functions for buildings, and time-dependent fragility functions for deteriorating structures. In 1985 together with her students and faculty from electrical and mechanical engineering, she developed the first wireless accelerometer and the overall concept of wireless structural health monitoring for which Stanford holds a patent. Her research is published in more than 350 articles. She was the director of the John. A. Blume Earthquake Engineering Center at Stanford and has served on numerous committees and boards at Stanford, various university consortia and national and international organizations. She was a co-founder of two technology companies – K2 Technologies, Inc. and Sensametrics, Inc. She has given more than 40 invited, keynote and distinguished lectures. Dr. Kiremidjian has been recognized with the Extraordinary Achievement Award in Loss Estimation from Applied Technology Council, the C. Martin Duke Award from the American Society of Civil Engineers, the John Fritz Medal (one of the highest honors across all of engineering) from the American Association of Engineering Societies, the Lifetime Achievement Award in Structural Health Monitoring, and the Egleston Medal from Columbia University. In September of 2024 she will be awarded an Honorary Doctorate from Aarhus University in Denmark. She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, Distinguished Member of the American Society of Civil Engineers, and Honorary Member of the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute.
Thursday, May 30th 1:20 pm
Thinking that Connects Domains: Evolution of Ideas Across Art, Math, Science, and Technology
Julio M. Ottino, Ph.D., Walter P. Murphy Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering and Mechanical Engineering, Distinguished Robert R. McCormick Institute Professor, Northwestern University
Abstract: Technology is about invention, making and building; Science is about unveiling, revealing what may already be there. It can be argued that Math is about invention and creation as well as discovery. Philosophers, placing the emphasis on uniqueness, placed artistic creation on the highest plane. Is this, however, true? I will argue that it is not and that there are thinking processes and useful lessons that can be transferred across domains. Transfer does not need to be at a purely technical level. Conceptual implications are critical as well. Considerable advances take place when disconnected domains merge into larger wholes. This talk will cover examples from dynamical systems, statistical mechanics, and fluid dynamics including examples of when ideas overreach. The lesson of history being a good teacher will be at the center of the narrative.
Biosketch: Julio Mario Ottino is a researcher, engineering scientist, artist, author, and educator. He is a professor, and former dean, in the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science as well as a professor in the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. He previously held positions at UMass Amherst as well as chaired and senior appointments at Caltech, Stanford, and Minnesota. He is the founder and co-director of the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO) and numerous university-wide initiatives, programs, and centers in the areas of design, energy and sustainability, human-computer interaction, and entrepreneurship, with the Kellogg School of Management, Pritzker School of Law, Feinberg School of Medicine, Medill School of Journalism, and the School of Education and Social Policy within Northwestern, as well as with external partners ranging from the Argonne National Lab to the Art Institute of Chicago. His work on chaos, complexity, and granular dynamics has impacted a wide range of fields in physical and geophysical sciences, engineering, and nonlinear dynamics and has been featured on the covers of Nature, Science, Scientific American, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, and other publications. He has supervised more than 65 PhD theses and written over 260 papers. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the recipient of multiple awards from APS and the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE). In 2008 he was awarded the Fluid Dynamics Prize from APS and selected by AIChE as one of the “One Hundred Engineers of the Modern Era”. In 2017, he was awarded the Bernard M. Gordon Prize for Innovation in Engineering and Technology Education from the National Academy of Engineering for the concept of whole-brain engineering. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and is a member of both the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences as well as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His 2022 MIT press book, The Nexus, dealing with creativity and innovation at the intersection of art, technology, and science, in collaboration with noted designer Bruce Mau, was selected as category winner in the 2023 PROSE Award from the Association of American Publishers.
Friday, May 31st 8 am
Probing multi-hazard risk and resilience in coastal industrial settings: the promise of smart and equitable models
Jamie Ellen Padgett, Ph.D., Stanley C. Moore Professor and Department Chair, Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering, Rice University
Abstract: Many coastal communities are co-located and intrinsically interwoven with industrial installations, including ports, chemical plants, or oil and gas operations. While these installations are often strategically placed on the coast, their positioning alongside neighboring communities leaves them jointly susceptible to hurricane-induced hazards and their compound effects. In these settings, NaTech risks are prominent, where damage to industrial structures like tanks can results in hazardous material spills in fenceline communities; infrastructure failures and downtime can impair commodity flows through intermodal transportation networks or access within neighboring communities. This presentation explores methods for modeling multi-hazard reliability, risk and resilience in coastal industrial settings. We probe quantification of parameterized structural fragility and multi-hazard risk, resilience of industrial installations and infrastructure systems, and cascading community consequences. Case studies are leveraged along the US Gulf Coast to draw insights from the structure- to community-scale on opportunities for both methodological advances and practical resilience enhancement. In particular, we probe the promise of smart and equitable modeling as a paradigm for guiding improved resilience quantification.
Biosketch: Jamie E. Padgett is the Stanley C. Moore Professor and Department Chair of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Rice University. Padgett is a structural engineer whose research is focused on multi-hazard risk and resilience modeling of structures and infrastructure systems, while understanding their impacts on communities. Dr. Padgett has received such honors as the TAMEST Edith and Peter O’Donnell Award, the EMI Objective Resilience Distinguished Lecturer, and the Walter L. Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize. She is a Fellow of ASCE’s Structural Engineering Institute (SEI), an NSF BRITE Fellow, and a member of the IASSAR Executive Committee. Padgett serves in leadership roles within several large national research efforts including the NIST funded Center of Excellence for Risk-based Resilience Planning, the NSF funded Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI) Cyberinfrastructure “DesignSafe”, and the Severe Storm Prediction Education and Evacuation from Disasters (SSPEED) Center. She is the Faculty Director of the inaugural Gulf Scholars Program at Rice University funded by NASEM’s Gulf Research Program.
