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In southeastern Pennsylvania, CSX Transportation sought to increase the productivity of its Trenton Line freight rail service by improving the vertical clearance of its tracks so that it could operate...
Updating History
A beloved 1921 Parker truss bridge in Healdsburg, California, underwent an extensive rehabilitation and seismic retrofit so that the community could continue to use the historic crossing....
Room To Grow
The Victoria and Albert Museum, London’s renowned decorative arts and design museum, has unveiled a new, expansive underground exhibition gallery topped by an elegant courtyard. The need to maximize the...
Safer in Seattle
Constructed in the early 1900s, the Elliott Bay Seawall, in Seattle, protects the city’s downtown waterfront from the erosive forces of Puget Sound and Elliott Bay. Because of its deteriorating condition...
Pipeline Protection
To improve the seismic reliability of three critical pipelines, California’s Santa Clara Valley Water District installed what is believed to be the first large-diameter earthquake-resistant ductile iron...
Design of the Future Mexico City Airport: Attaining Resilience in Soft Ground
The Lake Texcoco region to the east of Mexico City is famed for its deep lacustrine deposits of compressible clay, which amplify ground shaking during seismic events. The area is also gradually subsiding...
Supertall in Seoul
The first supertall building in South Korea, the 555 m Lotte World Tower, in Seoul, features a gently curving, tapered shape and a mast, dubbed the “lantern,” that consists of two separate diagrid structures...
Dramatic Production
The Yard at Chicago Shakespeare offers a configurable space for theatrical performances of many sizes beneath an existing protective tent. By fully modeling the oddly shaped space and carefully considering...
Transformative Tower
The tallest structure in San Francisco, Salesforce Tower, has transformed the city’s skyline. And by being the first skyscraper to extend deep foundations into the city’s bedrock, the first to extend performance-based...
Preparing for Inundation
Tsunamis might be infrequent and localized, but their impact on coastlines can be catastrophic. Over the past 10 years, engineers have been gearing up to better prepare structures and communities for inundation....
Calibration of Jackup Leg Foundation Model Using Full-Scale Structural Measurements
The fitness of jack-up rigs to operate in varying water depths and weather conditions is determined by "site-specific" structural assessments. These assessments are conducted by a wide range of companies...
Seismic Data from Smartphones: MyShake: Building a Global Smartphone Seismic Network
Increasing the density of earthquake-monitoring instruments at a fast rate and at a low cost is a dream for many researchers who study earthquakes. MyShake, a smartphone application developed by the Berkeley...
Cracking the Nuclear Code: Finding an Alternative to the Nuclear Density Gauge
Two of the most basic quality control tests made in the field during soil construction are the soil’s moisture content and density. The establishment of a uniform procedure to compare the performance of...
A Faculty Internship: Reconnecting with the Profession
After spending eight years as a full-time academic administrator at Lafayette College in Easton, PA – one of only a handful of institutions where discipline-specific engineering programs are embedded in...
Optimized Drilled Shaft Design through Post-Grouting: Shorten That Shaft for Better Performance
Tip post-grouting is a technique used to inject, under pressure, a neat cement grout beneath the base of a drilled shaft. This method enhances or improves axial load-displacement performance by increasing...
Geotechnical Aspects of Pavements: There's More to Roads than Asphalt and Concrete!
When you jump on the highway to make that commute to work, do you think much about what's under the surface you ride on? Pavements are layered systems designed to provide a strong structure to support...
Performance-Based Earthquake Engineering: What Can It Do for You?
There's been a lot of talk, and some confusion, lately about performance-based earthquake engineering (PBEE). Many geotechnical engineers wonder -- what is it, how does it differ from what I've been doing,...
You Designed It for the Big One, Right? Illustrating and Communicating Uncertainty in a Deterministic Seismic Hazard Analysis
In seismic regions of the U.S. and worldwide, engineers design structures to withstand seismic ground motions resulting from a large, rare earthquake. But definitions of "large" and "rare" depend on who...
Pervious Concrete
Pervious concrete consists of a hydraulic cementitious binding system combined with an open-graded aggregate to produce a rigid pavement with typically 15% to 25% interconnected void space....
General
Design of Latticed Steel Transmission Structures specifies requirements for the design, fabrication, and testing of members and connections for electrical transmission structures. These...
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