Seminars

Building Big Underground – Modern Challenges in meeting the demands of expanding the Urban Environment
Luis Piek

The share of the world’s population living in cities is expected to rise to 80% by 2050. To meet the current and future transportation demands while minimizing disturbance to existing infrastructure, City municipalities are expanding their subterranean networks, requiring longer, larger, and more extensive underground networks. Additional challenges include crossing active faults, meeting high seismic demands, and large excavations adjacent to tall buildings and their interaction with existing and future tunnels.

A Smart Train Concept for High-Speed Ultrasonic Monitoring of Railroad Tracks
Diptojit Datta

Every year, the railroad industry transports over 10,000 billion freight ton-kilometers and 3000 billion passenger-kilometers around the world. Internal defects in rails and degrading ballast support conditions for railroad ties are some of the major causes of train derailment related accidents. Timely detection of such defects is of critical interest to the railroad maintenance community for ensuring the reliability of the railroad infrastructure.

Construction Disputes and Structural Failures: In-depth Technical Investigations for Providing Answers
Jeffrey Hunt & Joaquin Marquez

Structural failures and disputes on construction projects often leave owners, engineers, contractors, and the general public questioning “How?”, “Why?”, and “What went wrong?” Answering these questions requires detective work, technical analyses, and engineering insight. In this talk, the presenters introduce the world of forensic engineering and consulting. Case studies of a couple of recent projects will be discussed, including those that involve claimed design errors/omissions, defects, and
construction sequencing issues.

Enabling the Mass Timber Revolution: Resilience, Sustainability, and Technology
John W. van de Lindt

As we move through the decades since three seminal earthquakes between 1989 and 1995 occurred there has been a mega-shift toward resilience and sustainability, and the shared-use facilities within NEES and NHERI have been truly integral to this still-accelerating story; included here will be the evolution of the wood building as an illustrative example.  This talk will take you back 25 years beginning in the 1990’s with woodframe research and on to performance-based seismic design of taller wood buildings.

Base Isolation of an Existing Building and Unique “Hashtag” Science Building
Matt Skokan, Ph.D., S.E and Nofel Teldjoune, P.E. Saiful Bouquet Structural Engineers

This seminar will focus on the technical aspects of two challenging projects currently being designed at Saiful Bouquet, including one new building and one retrofit of an existing building:

1. Base Isolation of an Existing Building
2. Unique “Hashtag” Science Building

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