Mediaplanet and Northeastern University Team Up to Promote Higher Education for Smart Cities

Cision  

2018-06-29

In this issue, the spotlight is on new university programs and research that are making it a priority to prepare students for a new wave of careers with the rise of the new technology that goes into smart city development. Dr. Jerome Hajjar, a professor from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Northeastern University, shares that students at Northeastern are gaining real-world experience outside of the classroom by participating in experimental research using new technologies to improve infrastructure in the Boston region. Northeastern’s programs and research initiatives allow students to identify problems that exist in areas like transportation, mobility and disaster response outside the classroom...

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‘There is enough wind energy capacity off the east coast to power the entire country’

News @ Northeastern  

2018-05-30

“This is an industry that is about to explode,” said Northeastern engineering professor Jerome Hajjar. He is part of a multi-university team of researchers outlining a national research infrastructure plan for offshore wind facilities. There is enough wind energy capacity off the east coast to power the entire country, Hajjar said, and Massachusetts is the first state to invest heavily in taking advantage of this resource. Here, Hajjar, CDM Smith Professor and chair of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, explains where wind energy is headed, and how Northeastern is poised to play a role in making the industry a success...

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Building for collapse: Professor designs more resilient steel structures

News @ Northeastern  

2018-03-20

Jerome Hajjar, CDM Smith Professor and chair of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Northeastern, led a study at the time examining one such building to figure out why it failed. The structure was up to code and met all industry standards. But its design fundamentally lacked resilience, Hajjar said on Monday in the Raytheon Amphitheater as he delivered the 54th annual Robert D. Klein Lecture...

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Engineering prof says Florida bridge collapse an anomaly, urges close look at old structures

News @ Northeastern  

2018-03-16

We asked Jerome Hajjar, CDM Smith Professor and chair of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, to explain the “accelerated bridge technique” used and what safety codes are in place for bridges of this type...

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Northeastern researchers design robots to assist with disaster relief

News @ Northeastern  

2017-09-21

Padir is working with faculty colleagues Jerome Hajjar, CDM Smith Professor and chair of civil and environmental engineering, and Peter Boynton, professor of practice of social science and humanities, to build automated aerial robots to detect infrastructure damage after extreme events. The goal of the project, which is being funded by a seed grant from Northeastern’s Global Resilience Institute, is to “minimize additional disasters caused by disasters,” Padir said, citing the nuclear accident in Fukushima and the explosions from a chemical plant in Houston after Hurricane Harvey as prime examples of cases where his aerial robot could be helpful...

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Hurricane risk assessment of offshore wind turbines

Spencer T Hallowell, Andrew T Myers, Sanjay R Arwade, Weichiang Pang, Prashant Rawal, Eric M Hines, Jerome F Hajjar, Chi Qiao, Vahid Valamanesh, Kai Wei, Wystan Carswell, Casey M Fontana

2018 A barrier to the development of the offshore wind resource along the US Atlantic coast is a lack of quantitative measures of the risk to offshore wind turbines (OWTs) from hurricanes.The research presented in this paper quantifies the risk of failure of OWTs to hurricane-induced wind and waves by developing and implementing a risk assessment framework that is adapted from a well-established framework in performance-based earthquake engineering. Both frameworks involve the convolution of hazard intensity measures (IMs) with engineering demand parameters (EDPs) and damage measures (DMs) to estimate probabilities of damage or failure...

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The Massachusetts Research Partnership MRP and the Partnership for Offshore Wind Energy Research in the US Power-US: Implications for the Development of th...

KP Thiagarajan, M Lackner, JF Manwell, D Breger, SR Arwade, A Myers, J Hajjar, F Courtney, E Hines, C Niezrecki, A Kirincich, S Lohrenz, D Cash

2018 In order for our nation to develop its vast offshore wind resource in a manner that respects the ocean environment and its many stakeholders, it is critical that we develop a coordinated, long-term strategic vision for advancing American innovation in this new industry. This vision is particularly relevant to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which has, inter alia, set a target of 25% of its electricity needs supplied by renewable sources by 2030. In accordance with this goal the Commonwealth has also mandated that 1600 MW of offshore wind be installed by 2027...

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Elastic flexural rigidity of steel-concrete composite columns

Mark D Denavit, Jerome F Hajjar, Tiziano Perea, Roberto T Leon

2018 The use of elastic analysis is prevalent in the design of building structures even under loading conditions where inelasticity would be expected. Accordingly, geometric and material properties used in the elastic analyses must be carefully selected to maintain accuracy. Steel-concrete composite columns experience different forms of inelasticity...

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Data Processing of Point Clouds for Object Detection for Structural Engineering Applications

Sara B. Walsh, Daniel J. Borello, Burcu Guldur, Jerome F. Hajjar

2013 This research investigates the use of high‐resolution three‐dimensional terrestrial laser scanners as tools to capture geometric range data of complex scenes for structural engineering applications. Laser scanning technology is continuously improving, with commonly available scanners now able to capture over 1,000,000 points per second with an accuracy of ∼0.1 mm. This research focuses on developing the foundation toward the use of laser scanning to structural engineering applications, including structural health monitoring, collapse assessment, and post‐hazard response assessment. One of the keys to this work is to establish a process for extracting important information from raw laser‐scanned data sets such as the location, orientation, and size of objects in a scene, and location of damaged regions on a structure. A methodology for processing range data to identify objects in the scene is presented. Previous work in this area has created an initial foundation of basic data processing steps. Existing algorithms, including sharp feature detection and segmentation are implemented and extended in this work. Additional steps to remove extraneous and outlying points are added. Object detection based on a predefined library is developed allowing generic description of objects. The algorithms are demonstrated on synthetic scenes as well as validated on range data collected from an experimental test specimen and a collapsed bridge. The accuracy of the object detection is presented, demonstrating the applicability of the methodology. These additional steps and modifications to existing algorithms are presented to advance the performance of data processing on laser scan range data sets for future application in structural engineering applications such as robust determination of damage location and finite element modeling.

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Seismic performance of highway bridges with fusing bearing components for quasi‐isolation

Evgueni T. Filipov, Jessica R. Revell, Larry A. Fahnestock, James M. LaFave, Jerome F. Hajjar, Douglas A. Foutch, Joshua S. Steelman

2013 Modern highway bridges in Illinois are often installed with economical elastomeric bearings that allow for thermal movement of the superstructure, and steel fixed bearings and transverse retainers that prevent excessive movement from service‐level loadings. In the event of an earthquake, the bearing system has the potential to provide a quasi‐isolated response where failure of sacrificial elements and sliding of the bearings can cause a period elongation and reduce or cap the force demands on the substructure. A computational model that has been calibrated for the expected nonlinear behaviors is used to carry out a parametric study to evaluate quasi‐isolated bridge behavior. The study investigates different superstructure types, substructure types, substructure heights, foundation types, and elastomeric bearing types. Overall, only a few bridge variants were noted to unseat for design‐level seismic input in the New Madrid Seismic Zone, indicating that most structures in Illinois would not experience severe damage during their typical design life. However, Type II bearing systems, which consist of an elastomeric bearing and a flat PTFE slider, would in some cases result in critical damage from unseating at moderate and high seismic input. The sequence of damage for many bridge cases indicates yielding of piers at low‐level seismic input. This is caused by the high strength of the fixed bearing element, which justifies further calibration of the quasi‐isolation design approach. Finally, the type of ground motion, pier height, and bearing type were noted to have significant influence on the global bridge response.

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