SUNMONTUEWEDTHUFRISAT
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for November
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Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering along with UCLA Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Wed, Nov 05, 2014 @ 04:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Bruce Logan, Pennsylvania State University, AEESP Distinguished Lecturer
Talk Title: Microbial Fuel Technologies for Renewable Power and Biofuels Production from Waste Biomass
Abstract:
The ability of certain microorganisms to transfer electrons outside the cell has created opportunities for new methods of renewable energy generation based on microbial fuel cells (MFCs) that can be used to produce electrical power, microbial electrolysis cells (MECs) for transforming biologically generated electrical current into transportable fuels such as hydrogen and methane gases, as well as other devices to desalinate water or capture phosphorus. In this presentation, Dr. Logan will summarize key findings in the electromicrobiological studies of the exoelectrogenic microorganisms and communities that produce electrical current, and the electrotrophic and methanogenic communities that are used to produce hydrogen and methane gases. Recent advances will be highlighted on materials and architectures that are being developed to make these different types of METs more cost efficient, which are leading to them becoming commercially viable technologies.
Biography:
Professor Bruce E Logan is an Evan Pugh Professor, the Stan & Flora Kappe Professor of Environmental Engineering, and Director of the Engineering Energy & Environmental Institute at Penn State University. He is the founding Deputy Editor of the new ACS journal Environmental Science & Technology Letters, and a member of the US National Academy of Engineering (NAE), and a fellow of AAAS, the International Water Association (IWA), the Water Environment Federation (WEF), and the Association of Environmental Engineering & Science Professors (AEESP). Dr. Logan is a visiting professor at several universities including Newcastle University (England) and Tsinghua University (China), with ties to several other universities in Saudi Arabia, Belgium and China. He received his Ph.D. in 1986 from the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to joining the faculty at Penn State in 1997, he was on the faculty at the University of Arizona
Host: Dr. Amy Childress
Location: Grace Ford Salvatori Hall Of Letters, Arts & Sciences (GFS) - 106
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Evangeline Reyes
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Astani CEE Seminar
Fri, Nov 14, 2014 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Dominiki Asimaki, Department of Mechanical and Civil Engineering, Caltech
Talk Title: Site effects in three dimensions: Theory, experiments and numerical simulations
Abstract:
This seminar will cover a series of studies on site effects, ranging from semi-ana¬lytical solutions of wave propagation in infinite wedges, to centrifuge experiments on topo¬graphy effects, to numerical simulations of idealized and true ground surface features subjected to seismic loading. Starting from the simplest configuration, I will first discuss our work on the response of infinite wedges, which comprises a semi-analytical solution and numerical simulations of wedge response to incident in-plane shear (SV) and compressional (P) waves. I will present results, focusing specifically on the insight that idealized features provide into the physics of wave focusing and scattering by non-flat surfaces in the context of earthquake ground motion simulations. I will then summarize results of a collaborative project that used cen¬trifuge experiments to study site effects for single, step-like slopes on the surface of shallow granu¬lar soils overlaying stiff bedrock; and I will present in detail our validated nonlinear numerical simulations of the said experiments, which we have extended to study the effects of soil stiffness and thickness, and the effects of bedrock-soil velocity contrast on the ground motion characteristics near the slope crest. Our results have shown that the inelastic response of pressure-dependent soils near the surface has a significant impact on the manifestation of topographic amplification, which may differ substantially from viscoelastic model predictions traditionally used in studies of site effects on the surface of non-flat ground. In the last part of the talk, I will present a system of dimensionless parameter¬s that we have synthesized from our semi-analytical, experimental and numerical results for the study of 3D site effects; a systematic parametric investigation of 3D site effects for idealized features; and a series of site-specific simulations at strong motion station sites in Southern California with irregular ground surface topography.
Biography: Dominiki Asimaki is a Professor of Mechanical and Civil Engineering at Caltech. She has a bachelorâs diploma in civil engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece (1998), and an MS (2000) and PhD (2004) from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT. Her research combines geotechnical engineering, computational mechanics, and structural dynamics to study how natural and man-made geotechnical systems (ridges, valleys, dams, tunnels, building foundations, and offshore structures) respond to dynamic loading induced, for example, by earthquakes, hurricanes, and blast. She then uses results from these studies to develop predictive models for resilient design procedures for geotechnical systems, and for hazard assessment and mitigation in urban environments. Domniki is associate editor for the Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering (ASCE), for Earthquake Spectra (EERI), and for Soils and Foundations (Japanese Geotechnical Society); and she is the recipient of the 2009 Arthur Casagrande Award from the ASCE Geo-Institute and the 2012 Shamsher Prakash Research Award in Geotechnical Earthquake Engineering.
Host: Dr. Maria Todorovska
Location: Seeley G. Mudd Building (SGM) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Evangeline Reyes
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CEE Ph. D. Seminar
Fri, Nov 21, 2014 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Farrokh Jazizadeh, CE Ph.D. Candidate
Talk Title: User-Centric Smart Sensing For Non-Intrusive Electricity Consumption Disaggregation in Buildings
Abstract: Non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) is a low-cost alternative to appliance level sub-metering, that leverages signal processing and machine learning techniques to estimate the power consumption of individual appliances from whole-home measurements. However, the difficulty associated with obtaining training data sets for the commonly used supervised NILM classification algorithms is a major obstacle in wide commercial adoption of the technology. The diversity of electrical load signatures (patterns of appliancesâ power draw) demands in-situ training (labeling of the signatures), which often needs to be performed by users through user-system interaction. To produce the example signatures required for training, continuous interaction with users might be required, which could reduce the success of the training process due to user fatigue. Pre-populating a training data set could potentially reduce the need for user-system interaction. A heuristic unsupervised clustering algorithm has been presented and evaluated to enable autonomous partitioning of appliances signature space (i.e. feature space) for applications in electricity consumption disaggregation without a priori information. The algorithm determines the partition of a feature space recursively to account for multi-scale nature of the binary cluster tree.
Location: Seeley G. Mudd Building (SGM) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Evangeline Reyes