时间：2016年5月19日下午2:00

地点：土木工程学院地坤楼409室

报告人：Guirong (Grace) Yan博士

主持人：肖 岩 教授

Abstract

Large-scale space structures are usually built to cover venues where hundreds or thousands of people assemble. Failure of this type of structure may endanger the lives of many people.Unfortunately, we have seen a number of collapses of this type of structure in recent years.In this talk, our recent research findings to prevent these catastrophic failures will be presented. It includes novel and simple approaches to detect two types of instability, member overall buckling for space grid structures and nodal snap-through (NST) instability for dome structures.The approach to detect member overall buckling is based on the fact that the bending stress induced by buckling leads the normal strain on the surface of the member to vary significantly along the member. This can be captured by the deviation in measured strains between two sections of a member. By identifying the deviation in strain at two different cross sections in a member, overall buckling of themember can be detected. The approach to detect NST instability is based on the fact that a local NST instability results in a significant displacement at a local joint or joints, leading the geometric shape/pattern in the local area to change significantly. This change can be captured by the change in tilting angles of the members around the snap-through nodes.This research bridges the gap between SHM and structural stability research and thus will make important contributions to the science of both SHM and structural instability. This research has been supporting by NSF.

Biographical Sketch:

Dr. Grace Yan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering at MS&T. Before this, she held an Assistant Professor position at U. of Texas at El Paso and a Lecturer position at U. of Western Sydney, Australia. She got her PhD degree from Harbin Institute of Technology in 2006. She has been actively involved in research on resilient infrastructural systems in multi-hazard environments, structural health monitoring, structural condition assessment, sensor technologies, energy harvesting and vibration control. She has published 28 journal papers and 45 conference papers. She is the recipient of 12 research grants from National Science Foundation (NSF) of the USA, University Transportation Center Consortium, Australian Research Council and NSF of China. She was awarded a NSF ENHANCE fellow in 2013-2014, a research award at UTEP in 2014 and a TRB minority students mentor in 2013. She is a reviewer of 14 international journals. She is a member of ASCE and ASEE.