NTU-CEE Distinguished Seminar Series: Professor B.F. Spencer, Jr
Organized By
CEE Seminar Committee
Host By
Assistant Professor Fu Yuguang
Topic
Rapid Post-earthquake Inspection and Evaluation of Civil Infrastructure
About the Seminar
In the aftermath of an earthquake, rapid structural inspection and evaluation are critical to ensure that the normal order of life, work, and production can be restored quickly. To date, initial assessments of structures are based on visual information collected manually by certified inspectors and are known to be time-consuming, dangerous, and subjective. Moreover, the number of inspectors in an earthquake affected region may be limited, further delaying efforts to conduct these initial inspections.
This lecture presents two recently proposed approaches for automated rapid post-earthquake safety assessment. The first approach employs sparse acceleration measurements to define damage-sensitive features that can be used to infer the condition of buildings. A convolutional neural network is then employed to uncover the complex relationship between the damage-sensitive features and the building condition. The proposed framework is validated experimentally using a 1/3-scale 18-story experimental steel building tested on the shaking table at E-Defense in Japan, confirming the efficacy of the proposed approach for rapid post-earthquake safety evaluation for high-rise buildings. Subsequently, a comprehensive strategy for rapid post-earthquake inspection and evaluation using images collected by commercial unmanned aerial vehicles is presented.
About the Speaker
B.F. Spencer, Jr. received his Ph.D. in theoretical and applied mechanics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1985. He worked on the faculty at the University of Notre Dame for 17 years before returning to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he currently holds the Nathan M. and Anne M. Newmark Endowed Chair in Civil Engineering and is the former Director of the Newmark Structural Engineering Laboratory.
His research has been primarily in the areas of structural health monitoring, structural control, stochastic fatigue, stochastic computational mechanics, and machine learning, and computer vision. Dr. Spencer has directed more than $70M in funded research and published more than 700 technical papers/reports, including two books.