CAEE Seminar: Toward Reliable Design of Service Facility Location: Addressing the Threat of Probabilistic Service Disruptions

The Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering department will be hosting a seminar featuring Gongkang Fu, Professor of Civil and Architectural Engineering and Chair of Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering at Armour College of Engineering. The topic of the seminar will be AASHTO Specifications and Beyond.

Abstract

This seminar will discuss the process of developing and implementing AASHTO (American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials) specifications. As an example, a research project will be briefly presented as an effort to revise current AASHTO Manual for Bridge Evaluation's Section 7 for steel bridge fatigue evaluation. There were two programs in the project, one experimental and the other analytical. The experimental research program included physical testing of fatigue prone details of steel bridges, particularly on tack welds and out-of-plane-bending caused fatigue. The analytical program addressed issues of current truck load spectrum compared with that several decades ago to ensure current validity of the specifications, possible negative remaining life, etc. The resulting revisions are being balloted for AASHTO to adopt.