Abstract:
Reinforced concrete (RC) bridges are currently designed to withstand severe natural and human-made hazard without collapse, but damage of concrete and yielding of reinforcing steel bars are allowed. Excessive damage increases downtime, and sometimes the structure is beyond the repair stage and must be replaced. In recent years, shape memory alloy (SMA) rebars have been widely employed to improve the performance of concrete structures and reduce their permanent deformations, especially when subjected to seismic and extreme loads. Although the effectiveness of SMA as reinforcement in seismic resistant design is well documented, performance of SMA-RC bridges under various multi-hazard scenario is not well understood. Currently available design codes and guidelines are adequate in addressing individual issues related to resilient bridge design, but fail in addressing the complexities in a multi-hazard environment, where these dependencies exist at multiple levels. This seminar will introduce the recent efforts on extending the bridge design concept using a performance-based approach from single hazard to multihazard to ensure enhanced resilience and protection, thus minimizing the adverse social and economic impacts of multiple hazards. To investigate the resiliency of RC bridges against multi-hazard scenarios, this presentation will discuss the performance of SMA-RC bridges under three extreme loading scenarios such as earthquake, vehicle collisions, and extrme wave loads. This study will present the details of the vehicle collision and wave load simulation in finite element environment. The results will be compared with conventional Steel-RC bridges under similar loaidng conditions. The outocmes of this study will aid in understanding the advantages of SMA as longitudinal reinforcement for improving the multihazard resiliency of highway bridges.
Bio:
Dr. Muntasir Billah is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Calgary, Canada. He received his PhD in structural engineering from the University of British Columbia, Canada. Dr. Billah was awarded the 2016 UBC Governor General’s Gold Medal—one of Canada’s most prestigious academic awards. Dr. Billah’s research has gained both national and international recognition with 65 peer-reviewed journal papers, more than 75 conference papers, and 9 invited presentations. Dr. Billah aims to amalgamate conventional engineering and application of advanced materials and tools to devise solutions that make the infrastructures more sustainable and resilient. Currently, Dr. Billah is serving as the chair of the concrete structures sub-committee of the Structures Division, Canadian Society for Civil Engineering (CSCE), and voting member of ACI Committee 341, Earthquake-Resistant Concrete Bridges. His research interests include performance-based seismic design and retrofit of bridges, multi hazard resilience of infrastructure, application of high-performance materials and artificial intelligence in structural engineering.
Open to all. Attendees external to Imperial need to register by email.
Time: 4:00 pm