Department of Civil Engineering

RESIST RESEARCH GROUP

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RESIST LAB


 CREATING SUSTAINABLE AND RESILIENT STRUCTURES

Frequent natural disasters and their associated damage continue to demonstrate how vulnerable our civil infrastructure is to earthquakes, tsunamis, and strong wind events. RESIST Research Group's goal is to increase the resiliency of our structures to natural hazards while incorporating sustainable materials with lower life-cycle costs. A key challenge is to develop methods based on advanced knowledge that will allow us to establish scientifically proven techniques to create sustainable and resilient structures while controlling costs. To this end, our research objective is to formulate and experimentally validate mechanics-based computational modeling methods to advance our understanding of the nonlinear behavior of structures and their foundations in a way that parallels large-scale experimentation. We are also working to create hybrid simulation methods and associated computer tools that combine mechanics-based models with machine learning to achieve much higher accuracy-to-computational cost ratios.
Our numerical models are also used to identify, rank, and rehabilitate vulnerable structures, including buildings, bridges, and their foundations.  While it is tempting to visualize the cities of the future as being entirely composed of new and smart buildings, they will in fact include many of the existing structures that are in use today. Our main challenge will be to upgrade millions of existing structures to increase their resiliency while adding sustainable and energy-efficient components. RESIST Research Group applies a multidisciplinary approach that combines the strengths of the structural and geotechnical disciplines to the end goal of characterizing the complex interactions between system components. Such computational modeling methods will accelerate the transition of the field away from the current minimum-requirement design philosophy to multicriteria performance-based design.

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Last Updated: 1/5/24