Research

Dr. HONG’S research interests lie in the general area of probabilistic analysis for civil engineering systems. His expertise includes in the area of probabilistic analysis of new and existing structures, code calibration, pipeline integrity assessment, and earthquake engineering.

Dr. Hong’s research contributions fall mostly in the area of reliability-based assessment and calibration of design codes (buildings, offshore structures, nuclear containment and timber structures), safety evaluation of existing structures, external load and load combination analysis, extreme-value theory, information-theoretical modeling of random variables in civil engineering, structural response under random excitation, earthquake occurrence modeling, point estimate methods, probabilistic consolidation analysis, safety assessment of existing bridges under corrosion attack, stochastic modeling for pitting corrosion, and optimum maintenance and inspection of deteriorating infrastructure systems.

More recently, Dr. Hong and his graduate students developed new modeling errors for short and slender reinforced concrete columns which can be used for calibrating and assessing the adequacy of resistance factors employed in the current design code for concrete structures. They also developed methods for evaluating resistance of reinforced concrete columns under axial load and biaxial bending. Their probabilistic analyses results indicated that the commonly used modal combination rule for structures subjected to earthquake excitation may not provide reliability-consistent response estimates. On going projects deal with system reliability evaluation and consequence analysis considering environmental actions.

Current Research Topics and Interests

Current research topics and interests include:

  1. Reliability assessment of existing structure and infrastructure systems;
  2. Optimum strengthening criteria for existing structures
  3. Probabilistic assessment of slope stability under spatial uncertain variability; and
  4. Optimum regionalization and optiumum design for rare environmental loads
  5. Reliability of deteriorating reinforced concrete columns under stochastic excitation;
  6. Earthquake occurrence modeling;