Structural Engineering

Developing Engaging Concept-Driven Tools and Strategies for Teaching Structural Design

November 03, 2022 - 3:00 pm

Speaker: Joel Lanning

Structural engineering students are expected to have a well-developed understanding of structural design upon graduation. However, many students achieve only a low level of understanding and design abilities amounting to “plug-and-chug” and “being able with the table.” These student outcomes are simply not acceptable when it comes to designing structures that affect the lives of countless people.

A Brief Overview Of Single-Family Home Design And Residential Structural Engineering

November 02, 2022 - 12:00 pm

Speaker: Nicholas J. Martignetti and Richard J. Zabel

Mulhern + Kulp is a full-service structural engineering consulting firm, providing services to architects, builders, and developers nationwide. As one of the largest firms in the residential industry, we specialize in wood framed design, particularly single-family homes and townhomes. Please join us to learn more, as we will be reviewing some general wood construction knowledge and common terms, going over construction roles and the people involved, outlining the design services provided by Mulhern + Kulp, and discussing the importance of structural engineering in residential design.

The NHERI TallWood Project Shake Table Test of Mass Timber Building

October 31, 2022 - 12:00 pm

Speaker: Jeffrey Berman

To advance the wood products market, new design solutions for tall wood buildings using mass timber products are being developed. In particular, post-tensioned rocking walls built with cross-laminated timber (CLT) or other mass timber products have been proposed as a seismic resilient lateral system. To advance the seismically resilient mass timber solutions for tall buildings, a comprehensive shake table test program of a 10-story building with mass timber rocking walls is underway. Construction and testing is taking place on the NHERI@UC San Diego outdoor shaking table.

The NHERI TallWood Project Shake Table Test of Mass Timber Building

October 26, 2022 - 12:00 pm

Speaker: Keri L. Ryan

To advance the wood products market, new design solutions for tall wood buildings using mass timber products are being developed. In particular, post-tensioned rocking walls built with cross-laminated timber (CLT) or other mass timber products have been proposed as a seismic resilient lateral system. To advance the seismically resilient mass timber solutions for tall buildings, a comprehensive shake table test program of a 10-story building with mass timber rocking walls is underway.

A Journey Towards Testing A Full-Scale 10-Story Wood Building

October 24, 2022 - 12:00 pm

Speaker: Shiling Pei, PhD. P.E.

Wood has thousands of years of history as a building material but has also been restricted by building codes and regulations following the industrial revolution. Wood building is viewed as a cost-effective, but less engineered system mainly for low-rise options. Mass timber construction is a relatively new way of utilizing wood material for modern, high performance buildings at both large and small scales. It gives rise to the currently trending conception of wooden sky-scrapers.

Active Architected Matter with Embedded Intelligence

October 19, 2022 - 12:00 pm

Speaker: Amir H. Alavi

There is an unceasing quest to create novel forms of intelligent active matter that exhibits sensing, energy harvesting, actuating, computing, and communication functionalities. Realizing such capabilities can provide new road maps to autonomous and electronic materials with numerous applications in robotics, human-machine interfacing, micro/nano-electromechanical systems, and flexible electronics.

Analysis, Visualization, and Design

October 12, 2022 - 12:00 pm

Speaker: Mike Korolyk

In nonlinear response history analysis, each project is a new adventure.

To begin with, each building is different: different material type, different architecture, different configuration, different topography. On top of that, seismic demands vary from one site to another and from one Code cycle to another.

Armed with our past experience, we build a complicated model, attempting to make the right choices with regard to granularity and elemental inputs.

Neural Networks in Scientific Computing

April 20, 2022 - 12:00 pm

Speaker: Daniel M. Tartakovsky

 Neural networks (NNs) have become ubiquitous in scientific computing, including qualitative predictions of subsurface phenomena. Yet, the question of what they are good for remains unresolved. We discuss several where NNs might offer advantages over the existing alternatives. One is the use of NNs as surrogates or emulators of partial differential equations (PDEs) that describe the dynamics of complex systems. A virtually negligible computational cost of such surrogates renders them an attractive tool for ensemble-based computation, which requires a large number of repeated PDE solves.

Data-driven Solid Mechanics for Big and Small Data

April 13, 2022 - 12:00 pm

Speaker: Steve WaiChing Sun

We present an adaptive hybridized model-based/model-free strategy that ensures the feasibility of multi-physics simulations when different amounts of data are available.  In the data-rich situation, we extend the data-driven approach where the hydraulic and solid constitutive laws may switch from model-free to mode-based depending on the availability of data. Techniques related to identifying the constitutive manifold, the influence of the normed space, and the distance-minimized algorithm accelerated by the K-dimensional tree search will be discussed.

Non-Invasive Subsurface Site Characterization for Seismic Ground Response Analyses

April 11, 2022 - 12:00 pm

Speaker: Professor Brady R. Cox, Ph.D., P.E.

Numerical earthquake wave propagation simulations, known as ground response analyses (GRAs), are commonly performed in an attempt to estimate the site-specific, frequency-dependent amplification of seismic waves (i.e., site effects) as they travel from a reference bedrock condition up through soil layers to the ground surface. The importance of accurately predicting site effects for engineering infrastructure projects in seismically active regions cannot be overstated.