Upcoming Seminars
Sustainability and the Structural Engineer
May 07, 2025 - 12:00 pm
Speaker: Sara Means
Structural materials such as steel and concrete account for more than 10% of the global carbon emissions, and structural engineers have a responsibility to reduce these carbon emissions in the built environment. This presentation will give an introduction to embodied carbon. What is embodied carbon, how do you calculate it, and how do you reduce it? We will discuss which materials are most sustainable and how to reduce embodied carbon in your projects. We will also give an overview of a simple Life Cycle Assessment.
Past Seminars
Design Construction
October 30, 2023 - 12:00 pm
Speaker: Eric Long and Kevin Chang
The successful completion of a project depends upon the integration of architectural design, structural detailing, and construction methods, with the most impactful ones born out of a synergy between the three stakeholders. This collaborative approach can also lead to material savings for the client as well as a reduction in the embodied carbon of the completed structure.
Leaning on the Past to Predict the Future – A Structural Engineering Perspective
October 25, 2023 - 12:00 pm
Speaker: Dr. Chukwuma Ekwueme, PE, SE, LEED AP
Dr.Ekwueme will present overviews of projects he has worked on over a thirty-year career as a structural engineer focusing on the design of new buildings, the seismic retrofit of existing buildings, and forensic investigations after earthquakes and other catastrophic events. Projects to be discussed include the design of the new airport traffic control tower in McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas, the seismic retrofit of the First Church of Christ in Pasadena, and the investigation of the collapse of the World Trade Center towers in New York. With each project, Dr.
Repair of San Francisco’s Leaning (Millennium) Tower
October 23, 2023 - 12:00 pm
Speaker: Ron Hamburger
Constructed in 2005-2009, the 58 story Millennium Tower, located at the corner of Fremont and Mission Streets in San Francisco, has settled more than 17 inches and tilted nearly 30 inches to the northwest. Litigation initiated in 2016 with homeowners seeking damages from the original development team and other parties. Under negotiated agreement, a $100 million foundation upgrade has been completed to arrest building settlement and allow for gradual recovery of tilt. The upgrade, completed in August of this year, involved installation of 18 new piles, extending to bedrock, around the bui
Preserving History: Lessons Learned Through Historic Restoration Projects
October 18, 2023 - 12:00 pm
Speaker: Peter Maloney and Lindsey Kuster
Restoring historic buildings presents a unique set of challenges for structural engineers, especially when dealing with archaic materials which have experienced long-term deterioration. This presentation will explore insights gained from two recent projects: a condition assessment and structural evaluation of the iconic Tustin Hangars, and the restoration and reconstruction of the Balboa Botanical Building in Balboa Park. Through these case studies, we’ll discuss the requirements of the Historic Building Code and the challenges of working on 100-year-old + structures.
LANL Test Engineering's Structural Dynamics Research and Development Efforts
October 11, 2023 - 12:00 pm
Speaker: Dr. Scott Anthony Ouellette
LANL’s Test Engineering organization serves the national mission of maintaining a strategic nuclear deterrent by providing high-quality empirical evidence through the execution and assessment of weapons system and component testing. Shock and vibration environmental testing provides one key piece of evidence for evaluation and qualification of these systems and components in the service environments incurred during a lifetime in the stockpile.
PUMA: A Rapid Enriched Simulation Development Framework - Efficiency & Scalability through Optimal Enrichments
October 04, 2023 - 12:00 pm
Speaker: Prof. Marc Alex Schweitzer
In this talk, the Partition of Unity Method (PUM) and its implementation in Fraunhofer SCAI’s PUMA software framework will be presented. The fundamental idea and benefit of the PUM is to reduce the necessary number of degrees of freedom of a simulation while attaining the required accuracy of the application by using application-dependent enrichment functions which can resolve highly localized behavior of the solution instead of using mesh-refinement and standard piecewise polynomial basis functions.
The Seismic Compliance Options for California Hospitals, an Update on SPC and NPC Requirements
June 07, 2023 - 12:00 pm
Speaker: Alvaro Celestino
California hospitals need to be seismically compliant per the requirements of the CAC by January 1, 2030. The CAC contains seismic compliance requirements for structural and non-structural elements. This presentation will discuss those requirements, progress done so far, the work ahead, possible extensions being discussed at the state level. Case studies will be discussed to highlight the process of seismic compliance.
Moffatt & Nichol – Overview of SD Projects
May 31, 2023 - 12:00 pm
Speaker: Patrick Chang & Valentina Vasquez
In 1941, John G. Moffatt and Frank E. Nichol formed partnerships in California to provide engineering and design services to the growing marine infrastructure of the West Coast of the United States. Initially, Moffatt & Nichol concentrated on harbor works and waterways, bridges, buildings, industrial facilities, military installations, and public works.
Utilizing Universal Panel Tester to Study Shear Behavior of Ultra-High-Performance Concrete
May 24, 2023 - 12:00 pm
Speaker: Dr. Dimitrios Kalliontzis
To prevent brittle failures of Ultra-High-Performance Concrete (UHPC) members due to diagonal shear cracks, it is crucial to better understand the shear-dominated mechanisms of UHPC. These mechanisms can be affected by the tension and compression fields developed in UHPC, which is investigated in this study through experiments of combined shear and axial loading. The experimental work is carried out with the Universal Panel Tester (UPT) at the University of Houston, where four unreinforced UHPC elements are tested, representing web elements cut out from large-scale UHPC beams.
Using ML to aid in True Performance Based Design of Isolated Buildings
May 22, 2023 - 12:00 pm
Speaker: Dr. Tracy Becker
Base isolation systems are often chosen in structural engineering to outperform conventional structural designs, allowing designers and owners to achieve high performance goals. However, achieving specific performance targets requires numerous high-fidelity analyses and often involves iteration in design, and analyzing their behavior in extreme events remains a difficult and computationally expensive task, especially when exploring diverse design options.