Engineering Now .: Volume 4 - Edition 7 .: April 2008

Western Engineering Ph.D. student wins Dean's Award for Research Excellence

The Society of Graduate Students and the Faculty of Graduate Studies has conferred upon M. Shahria Alam (PhD Student, Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering), The Dean's Award for Research Excellence for his first place oral presentation of "Seismic performance of a self-repairing beam-column joint" in the Physical Sciences Session, given at the 21st Annual Western Research Forum, March 29, 2008.

Shahria's doctoral dissertation investigates the use of a novel material, superelastic shape memory alloy (SMA) in designing reinforced concrete (RC) beam-column joints. Shahria has performed a number of experimental investigations of such original and repaired joints and developed a numerical model which can simulate the behaviour on such SMA RC elements with excellent accuracy. He also developed critical and essential design features of SMA RC structures from the analytical point of view and provided some numerical tools and guidelines for designers. He incorporated the beam-column joint model in a full scale model of RC frame structures. The results obtained from nonlinear seismic analyses proved the efficiency of such SMA RC beam-column joints in reducing earthquake damages. Shahria also developed a conceptual smart SMA RC bridge that can detect and repair damages, and adapt changes to the loading conditions. Thus, it mitigates many problems associated with infrastructure management.

Shahria's faculty supervisors are Dr. Moncef Nehdi and Dr. Maged A. Youssef, of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

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