Message from the Chair

Dear friends,

This has been an exciting year in the Department of Structural Engineering! We innaugurated the upgrade of our NHERI@UC San Diego Large High Performance Outdoor Shake Table to 6 degrees of freedom (LHPOST6), and are very excited for the testing of the TallWood structure. We are very pleased to recruit two new faculty members, Alessandro Palermo and Mehran Tehrani, who will be joining us in 2023. We are happy to share some of the interesting research projects in civil structures, geotechnical engineering, structural health monitoring, aerospace structures, and computational mechanics. We are extremely proud of our students, who had great success this year in organizing the 2022 Pacific Southwest Symposium for ASCE and won the steel bridge competition. We are proud of our alumni and are happy to see the success of a new startup, LIMBER Prosthetics. We will be having our next Structural Engineering Department Research Showcase in Spring 2023 to share more news and honor our alumni, and will be sending out announcements soon. We welcome you to reach out for more information on the Department or to stop by for a tour.

John McCartney

Chair, Department of Structural Engineering

Jacobs School of Engineering

UC San Diego

News

NSF director inaugurates newly upgraded earthquake shake table

National Science Foundation Director Sethuraman Panchanathan was on hand for the grand reopening of UC San Diego’s earthquake simulator. It is one of the two biggest shake tables in the world. The facility, run under the direction of structural engineering Professor Joel Conte, was recently upgraded with a $16.9M grant from NSF. It went from being able to move in one degree of freedom to six degrees of freedom. This will allow the facility to test structures with an unprecedented degree of accuracy when compared to real earthquake ground motions.

One of the first structures to be tested on the upgraded shake table is a 10-story wood frame building as part of the TallWood project sponsored by NSF. The goal is to show that tall buildings constructed of wood can be designed to achieve resilient goals in the face of earthquakes. The test structure built on the shake table is nearing completion.

Experimenting in space to prevent mudslides on Earth

An automated experiment designed by Professor Ingrid Tomac has been launched to the International Space Station to improve our ability to prevent mudslides after a fire here on Earth by studying the hydrodynamics of mudslides. Results could lead to improved mudflow models, new critical infrastructure and the development of early-warning systems.

Using motion capture data to develop next-gen wearables

Professor Ken Loh's ARMOR Lab is working with the Office of Naval Research on a low-cost wearable sensor that can measure human performance over long periods of time. The goal is to be able to monitor the health of soldiers when they're deployed, or athletes before, during and after training. “We’re developing these sensors based on fabric that could be affixed onto different portions of your body to measure how your muscles engage during different types of movements or training activities," said Loh.

Proposed updates to steel building standard could enhance earthquake resilience

Researchers at NIST and UC San Diego identified deficiencies in the performance of a type of steel column, with many buckling prematurely. Based on the results of experiments on one of the UC San Diego shake tables and a detailed data analysis, the researchers devised new limits for column slenderness. AISC has adopted the proposed limits in a draft for public feedback of the 2022 edition of AISC 341.

UC San Diego hosts ASCE Pacific Southwest Symposium

Students in the UC San Diego chapter of the Society for Civil and Structural Engineers hosted the ASCE Pacific Southwest Symposium in 2022, drawing 850 students from 14 universities to campus for challenges including the Concrete Canoe and Steel Bridge competitions. The UC San Diego Steel Bridge team won first place.

Alumni-led startup makes prostheses affordable, accessible

Alumni from the lab of structural engineering Professor Falko Kuester formed LIMBER Prosthetics to bring affordable prosthetics to those who need them. Using their unique combination of personalized scans as well as digital designs and 3D-printing on a large scale could reduce the cost of a prosthesis by anywhere from 50% to 90%.

Damage diagnostics via laser ultrasonic scattering

Research on ultrasonic-guided wave interrogation using piezoelectric arrays and full-field laser ultrasonic inspection focuses on the detection, classification, and prognosis of damage using elastic waves as the interrogation mechanism. The research group of Professor Michael Todd is embedding stochastic models and parametric curve scanning methods to account for uncertainty of model/physical parameters, in order to derive an optimal detection process that supports predictive modeling with quantified uncertainty.

Seismic Response of 18-story core wall building with force-limiting connections

A core wall system is a popular seismic force-resisting system for tall buildings. Researchers in structural engineering Professor Georgios Tsampras' lab are assessing the seismic response of an 18-story building with force-limiting connections that are modified to accommodate the 3-D kinematics in core wall buildings. Force-limiting connections allow the movement of the gravity load-resisting system relative to the seismic force-resisting system and limit the seismic-induced horizontal forces transferred between the two systems.

Machine-learning enhanced data-driven computing

Recent advancements in machine learning algorithms and data-driven computing offer new opportunities for the modeling of multi-scale multi-physics complex problems. Professor JS Chen’s research group developed a physics-informed data-driven constitutive modeling approach by integrating physical constraints into data-driven constitutive modeling. This could be applied to the numerical assessment of weldability of the explosive welding processes.

Alessandro Palermo, Professor

Palermo researches the development of novel resilient prefabricated systems and the understanding of their behavior under earthquakes. He brings expertise on construction methods, structural durability, novel long-lasting high-performance materials and multi-hazard independencies.

Mehran Tehrani, Assistant Professor

Tehrani researches multifunctional composites, at the intersection of advanced manufacturing, materials science and mechanics. Projects include additively manufactured polymer composites, metal-nanocarbon hybrid conductors, sustainable multi-material additive manufacturing, robotics composite manufacturing and graphene-based structural composites.

Awards

Professor Machel Morrison earned the Best Undergraduate Teacher award, and Professor Ingrid Tomac received the Outstanding Graduate Student Mentoring award.

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