Presentations at Structures Congress

Our group made a number of presentations at the 2018 Structures Congress in Fort Worth, Texas. 

These include: Jakub Valigura "Risk-Based Seismic Loss Assessment for RC Bridges, Accounting for Various Repair Strategies", Mohammad Salehi "Computational and Experimental Seismic Performance Evaluation of Hybrid Sliding-Rocking Bridges", Robert Chase "Damage Accumulation in Sequences of Induced Earthquakes", and Abbie Liel "Evaluation of ASCE 41 for Seismic Retrofit Design" and "Linking Community Participation to Structural Performance in Post Earthquake Housing Reconstruction Programs". 

Ph.D. Student Robert Chase, making his presentation. 

Ph.D. Student Jakub Valigura, at Structures Congress 2018

Congratulations, Jenny!

PhD student Jenny Ramirez was awarded the Graduate Teacher Program Award for Excellence in Academic Leadership. This award recognized Jenny's hard work in the Graduate Teacher Program (GTP): "Jenny’s work as Lead for the GTP this year was truly outstanding. Through her own hard work and initiative, she has vastly increased interest and participation in GTP programs by CEAE grad students. She performed an astounding twenty-four Videotape Teaching Consultations for her fellow TAs (Leads are only required to do two, and each VTC requires a good deal of time and energy). Equally impressively, at her own initiative Jenny personally went through the GTP workshop records for several hundred CEAE grad students, figured out which students had done at least five workshops, and then she contacted those students and encouraged them to finish their GTP Certificate in College Teaching. As a result, we’ve seen an increase in the number of grad students from your department at workshops and engaged in the certification process, which not only improves teaching, but also helps them on the job market.  Jenny also created a handbook for incoming and continuing graduate students to help them navigate the graduate program. Throughout the year she was in constant contact with our Lead Coordinators at GTP, figuring out what more she could do, and how she could do it better. We at GTP are so impressed with what she’s been able to do, and so grateful for all her hard work. "

Congratulations, Jenny! Thanks for all that you do! 

Jenny Ramirez, at the award ceremony. 

Graduation & Abbie awarded CEAE Research Development Award

Congratulations to the class of 2018! At the graduation ceremonies, Abbie was also awarded the Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering Research Development Award, recognizing the efforts of so many in our group. 

Samantha Grey, M.S. graduate! Great work Sam! 

Congratulations to Dr. Erin Arneson! I was delighted to be a part of your PhD journey. 

Tyler Davis, BS/MS Graduate. Congratulations, Tyler! 

New papers on liquefaction consequences and mitigation

Our group has authored three papers on liquefaction consequences and mitigation that have recently been published. These are: 

Bullock, Zach, Zana Karimi, Shideh Dashti, Keith Porter, Abbie Liel and Kevin Franke, “A Physics-Informed Semi-Empirical Probabilistic Model for the Settlement of Shallow Founded Structures on Liquefiable Ground”, Geotechnique, In Press, 2018.  We will also provide a spreadsheet that assists in doing the calculations for this model. Check back here soon for updates. 

Paramasivam, Balaji, Shideh Dashti and Abbie Liel, “Influence of Prefabricated Vertical Drains on the Seismic Performance of Structures Founded on Liquefiable Soils”, ASCE Journal of Geotechnical and Geeoenvironmental Engineering, In Press, 2018.

Olarte, Juan, Shideh Dashti and Abbie B. Liel, “Effects of Drainage Control on Densification as a Liquefaction Mitigation Technique”, Soil Dynamics and Earthquake Engineering, 110, 212-231, 2018.

Thanks Zach, Balaji and Juan for these excellent works of scholarship! 

Induced Seismicity Project in the News

Check out the story from Fox31 here. (Video featuring Anne Sheehan and Jenny Nakai is at the top of the link; video featuring Anne, Jenny and Abbie is at the bottom). 

Jenny wrote an inspiring blog post about her first year at CU

Check it out here! 

Abbie presented at the SEAOSC "Strengthening our Cities" Summit

Her talk on November 7, 2017 examined the role of life cycle analysis in supporting structural resilience and integrating ideas about sustainability and resilience.. 

New paper on impacts of ground densification as a liquefaction mitigation strategy

Over the past few decades, soil densification has been widely employed to reduce the liquefaction hazard or consequences on structures. The decision to mitigate and the design of densification specifications are typically based on procedures that assume free-field conditions or experience. As a result, the influence of ground densification on the performance of structures and the key mechanisms of soil-structure interaction remains poorly understood. This paper presents results of four centrifuge tests to evaluate the performance of 3- and 9-story, potentially-inelastic structures on liquefiable ground with and without densification. Densification was shown to generally reduce the net excess pore pressures and foundation permanent settlements (although not necessarily to acceptable levels), while amplifying the accelerations on the foundation. The influence of these demands on the performance of the foundation and superstructure depended on the structure’s strength and dynamic properties, as well as ground motion characteristics. In addition, densification tended to amplify the moment demand at the beam and column connections, which increased permanent flexural deformations and P-Δ effects (particularly on the heavier and weaker structure) that could have an adverse effect on foundation rotation. The experimental results presented aim to provide insight into the potential tradeoffs of ground densification, which may reduce foundation permanent settlement, but amplify shaking intensity that can result in larger foundation rotation, flexural drifts, and damage to the superstructure. These considerations are important for developing performance-based strategies to design mitigation techniques that improve performance of the soil-foundation-structure system in a holistic manner.

Check out Juan's paper:  CAN GROUND DENSIFICATION IMPROVE SEISMIC PERFORMANCE OF THE SOIL-FOUNDATION-STRUCTURE SYSTEM ON LIQUEFIABLE SOILS? It will be published by Earthquake Engineering and Structural Dynamics. 

Update. This paper is now available on the EESD website.