Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for January
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Astani CEE Seminar
Wed, Jan 15, 2014 @ 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Bill Spencer, Nathan M and Anne M. Newark Endowed Chair in Civil Engineering , University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Talk Title: Structural Health Monitoring of Civil Infrastructure: from Research to Engineering Practice
Abstract:
The ability to continuously monitor the integrity of civil infrastructure in real-time offers the opportunity to reduce maintenance and inspection costs, while providing for increased safety to the public. Furthermore, after natural disasters, it is imperative that emergency facilities and evacuation routes, including bridges and highways, be assessed for safety. Addressing all of these issues is the objective of structural health monitoring (SHM). Smart sensors densely distributed over structures can provide rich information for structural health monitoring using their sensing, computational, and wireless communication capabilities. Though smart sensor technology has seen substantial advances during recent years, implementation of smart sensors on full-scale structures has been limited; interdisciplinary efforts to address issues in sensors, networks, and application specific algorithms have only now begun to germinate. Following an overview of these issues, a new paradigm for structural health monitoring employing a network of smart sensors will be presented. Because of its ability to meet the demands of data intensive applications such as SHM, MEMSIC’s Imote2 is adopted for this research. The system is deployed to monitor the Jindo Bridge, a cable-stayed bridge in South Korea with a 344m main span. This project constitutes the world’s largest deployment of wireless sensors to monitor civil infrastructure and signifies a new paradigm for structural health monitoring that is leading to dramatic improvements over existing capabilities. A preview of recent efforts toward campaign monitoring of railroad bridges will also be presented.
Biography: Bill Spencer received his Ph.D. in theoretical and applied mechanics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1985. He worked on the faculty at the University of Notre Dame for 17 years before returning to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he currently holds the Nathan M. and Anne M. Newmark Endowed Chair in Civil Engineering and is the Director of the Newmark Structural Engineering Laboratory. His research has been primarily in the areas of smart structures, stochastic fatigue, stochastic computational mechanics, and natural hazard mitigation. He is a Fellow of ASCE, a Foreign Member of the Polish Academy of Sciences, the North American Editor in Chief of Smart Structures and Systems, and the past president of the Asia-Pacific Network of Centers for Research in Smart Structures Technology.
Location: Kaprielian Hall (KAP) - 209
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Evangeline Reyes
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Astani CEE Ph.D. Seminar
Fri, Jan 17, 2014 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Kelly T. Sanders, Astani CEE Faculty
Talk Title: Evaluating the efficacy of water conservation strategies through changes in the power sector
Abstract:
This presentation explores the effect of increasing the valuation of water through market levers as a mechanism to induce water savings from thermoelectric power plants the Electric Reliability Council of Texas' (ERCOT) electric grid. To do so, a unit commitment and dispatch model was utilized to simulate power generation, wholesale generation costs, water withdrawals, and water consumption across a set of increased cooling water costs ranging from 10 to 1,000 USD per acre-foot. This set of cooling water costs was applied to 1) the water consumed for power generation via evaporation and 2) the entire volume of water withdrawn for cooling. Results suggest that water withdrawals for cooling thermoelectric power plants in ERCOT can be reduced by as much as 75%, while water consumption can be reduced by 23% by imposing a fee for water. However, to achieve these water savings, wholesale electricity generation costs might increase as much as120% based on 2011 fuel costs and generation characteristics.
Although conventional long-term water supply projects tended to be more cost-effective than water management through shifts in power generation, the electric grid demonstrates short-term flexibility that conventional water supply projects do not. Thus, there might be conditions under which the grid could be effective at ââ¬Åsupplying" water, particularly during emergency drought conditions.
Location: John Stauffer Science Lecture Hall (SLH) - 102
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Evangeline Reyes
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Oral Defense Dissertation
Tue, Jan 21, 2014 @ 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Nan Li, Ph.D. Candidate, Astani Departmentof Civil and Environmental Engineering, USC
Talk Title: A Radio Frequency Based Indoor Localization Framework For Supporting Building Emergency Response Operations
Abstract: Building emergencies especially structure fires are big threats to the safety of building occupants and first responders. When emergencies occur, unfamiliar environments are difficult and dangerous for first responders to search and rescue, sometimes leading to secondary casualties. One way to reduce such hazards is to provide first responders with timely access to accurate location information. Despite its importance, access to the location information at emergency scenes is far from being automated and efficient. This thesis assesses the value of location information through a card game, and identifies a set of important requirements for indoor localization through a survey. The most important five requirements are: accuracy, ease of on-scene deployment, resistance to damages, computational speed, and device size and weight. The thesis proposes a radio frequency based indoor localization framework. When there is usable existing sensing infrastructure in a building, an iterative maximum likelihood estimation localization algorithm is proposed for the framework. The algorithm integrates a maximum likelihood estimation technique for location computation. The algorithm also introduces an iterative process that mitigates impacts of radio signalââ¬â¢s multipath and fading effects on localization accuracy. When no existing sensing infrastructure is accessible and an ad-hoc sensor network needs to be established, an environment aware beacon deployment algorithm is proposed for supporting a sequence based localization schema. The algorithm is designed to achieve dual objectives of improving room-level localization accuracy and reducing the effort required to deploy the ad-hoc sensor network. Moreover, building information models are integrated to both algorithms. Building information plays an important role in mitigating multipath and fading effects in iterative location computation, enabling the metaheuristic based search for building-specific satisfactory beacon deployment plans, and providing a graphical interface for user interaction and result visualization. The framework was validated in both simulations and real-world experiments. The simulations involved two fire emergency scenarios in an office building, and reported room-level accuracies of above 87.0% and coordinate-level accuracies of above 1.78 m. The real-world experiments involved the same test bed and scenarios, and used a smartphone based prototype. The experiments reported room-level accuracies of above 82.8% and coordinate-level accuracies of above 2.29 m. The framework was also proven to be deployable in limited time and robust against partial loss of devices, and could promisingly satisfy other aforementioned important requirements for indoor localization at building emergency scenes.
Location: Kaprielian Hall (KAP) - 209 Conference Room
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Evangeline Reyes
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Astani CEE Ph.D. Seminar
Fri, Jan 24, 2014 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Ruda Zhang and Mohamed Abdelbarr, Astani CEE Ph.D. Students
Talk Title: TBA
Abstract: TBA
Location: John Stauffer Science Lecture Hall (SLH) - 102
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Evangeline Reyes