With the aging of our nation's infrastructure comes safety concerns about existing systems based on geomaterials such as soil and concrete. The full development of proper reliability analyses of such systems will contribute to a rationally prescribed balance of safety and cost in engineering design and maintenance activities. An important part of this reliability analysis is to assess the effects of the randomness that is inherent in soil and concrete. This career development plan describes integrated research and educational activities aimed at improving the behavioral descriptions for these materials, thereby promoting reliability-based design and analysis for civil engineering applications.
The research plan consists of five phases that provide a logical and efficient progression from experimentally obtained microstructures to reliability analysis of such critical responses as local stresses in concrete and soils and local groundwater velocity in soils. Use of "moving-window GMC" and stochastic field theory establishes a much-needed link between micro-scale and macro-scale research on these materials. This research has potential to be extended within the fields of geotechnical and concrete engineering, as well as to be applied in other engineering fields (e.g., microelectronics, materials process modeling).
The advantages provided by probabilistic analysis and reliability-based design will be further promoted through an education plan to improve the incorporation of probability and statistics into the engineering curriculum, based on the development of probability modules to be applied to a range of civil engineering courses. Further, incorporation into educational activities of the visualization techniques developed in research will enhance presentation of complex course materials. In general, the education plan addresses the development of students (both full-time and in continuing education) who are confident in their abilities to solve complex problems by placing an emphasis on cross-disciplinary preparation.
