Research: Civil & Environmental Engineering
The Civil and Environmental Engineering department is recognized as an international research leader in the areas of multi-scale systems and structures reliability and risk, nuclear waste management, and leaching assessment approaches for environmental decision making. Research emphasizes understanding and improving the performance, including assessment of reliability and risk for advanced materials, complex structures, environmental systems and transportation systems.
Research Areas of Expertise
Risk and Reliability Engineering and Management
- Materials and structures; durability, fatigue and fracture
- Structural health monitoring and damage detection
- Large complex systems, decision-making under uncertainty, optimization
- Model uncertainty: verification, validation and extrapolation
- Enterprise (all hazards) risk management
Energy and Environment
- Nuclear environmental systems
- Leaching processes and assessment
- Contaminated site restoration & waste management systems design
- Molecular and multi-scale contaminant fate and transport
- Environmental risk assessment, management and communication
- Water quality & resources
Multi-Scale Structural Mechanics and Advanced Materials
- Multi-scale and multi-physics computational modeling of materials, structures and civil infrastructure systems
- Multi-scale characterization of durability of cement-based materials
- Risk and reliability analysis of composite systems
- Experimental impact, damage, and fracture behavior of nanocomposites
Transportation Systems
- Multi-modal freight transportation
- Environmental footprints
- Routing and logistics
- Transportation safety and hazardous materials transport