Bio: Troy is the CEO of HERA, an impact-led independent research association based in Aotearoa New Zealand. She is also the Co-Chair of Hanga-Aro-Rau (the Workforce Development Council for Manufacturing, Engineering and Logistics) and a Director of the Sustainable Steel Council, Steel Construction New Zealand and HERA Certifications. She is an Impact Assessor for the Endeavour program and holds advisory board roles for the Ministry of Innovation, Business and Employment (Building System Performance), Auckland University of Technology and the University of Auckland. She is the Impact Leader and creator of HERA’s $10.3 million funded Construction 4.0 project and is passionate about impact-led research, with a particular focus on sustainability, indigenous knowledge, diversity and inclusion, and industry transformation. 

Abstract: Engineering research intersects with societal and industrial demands, making it foundationally impact-led.  This presentation will explore how to identify impact-led research opportunities, build research capability and sectoral impact. HERA, a small independent research association in Aotearoa New Zealand, will be used as the case study to show that even small teams can have meaningful research impact.

Bio: Guo-Qiang Li is a distinguished professor of structural engineering in Tongji University, the director of Research Center of Education Ministry of China for Steel Construction and the director of National Research Center of China for Pre-fabrication Construction.  He is also a vice-chairman of Chinese Society of Steel Construction and a vice-chairman of Chinese Association of Construction Standardization.   In addition, he is a foreign member of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts, a fellow of Institution of Structural Engineers in UK and a fellow of the Council of Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat.

Abstract: The unexpected collapse of burning buildings has been a major killer of firefighters, since current techniques are very hard to accurately evaluate the collapse risk of a real building in fire. Developing a practical approach for early-warning fire-induced collapse of steel buildings in real-time is an urgent need, as these buildings account for a large part of collapse accidents due to severe degradation of steel mechanical properties at elevated temperatures in fire. The uncertainties of a burning building, such as load levels and heating conditions which differ from designed values, and the real-time acquisition of its structural responses to fire are two challenging issues need to be addressed. Through parametric analysis of collapse mechanisms considering uncertainties in real fire, the limited potential collapse modes of steel portal frames and steel trusses porpularly used for steel buildings are identified. Displacement responses of the burning building at key positions of the building structure, identified as Key Physical Parameters (KPPs), are selected for early warning fire-induced building collapse, as these displacements exhibit unique variation patterns for each collapse mode. Three-level early-warning strategy is proposed based on evolution laws of KPPs during the process of the building collapse. As some KPPs are hard to be measured directly in fire scene, especially for those located on the roof or inside the building, real-time acquisition method of the hard-to-measure KPPs through easy-to-measure data are investigated. Considering the close correlation between rotations and displacements at structural nodes at definite temperatures, pre-embedded thermocouples and inclinometers, which are easily employed in practice, are proposed to facilitate the real-time acquisition of hard-to-measure KPPs. Real fire tests have been conducted to verify the effectiveness of the approach for early-warning fire-induced collapse of steel portal frame and steel truss buildings.

Bio: Dr. Reddy is a Distinguished Professor, Regents’ Professor, and inaugural holder of the Oscar S. Wyatt Endowed Chair in Mechanical Engineering at Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas. Dr. Reddy, an ISI highly-cited researcher, is known for his significant contributions to the field of applied mechanics through the authorship of 25 textbooks and over 800 journal papers. His pioneering works on the development of shear deformation theories (that bear his name in the literature as the Reddy third-order plate theory and the Reddy layerwise theory) have had a major impact and have led to new research developments and applications. Some of the ideas on shear deformation theories and penalty finite element models of fluid flows have been implemented into commercial finite element computer programs like ABAQUS, NISA, and HyperXtrude. In recent years, Reddy's research has focused on the development of locking-free shell finite elements and nonlocal and non-classical continuum mechanics problems dealing with damage and fracture in architected structures and brittle solids.

Abstract: Architected materials are an emerging class of structures with enhanced mechanical properties to meet desired functionalities. The most common class of architected materials are lattice-based structures, which can be considered as a form of a very dense set of interconnected frame elements. While their superior mechanical properties make them highly desirable in engineering, their intricate microstructure results in complex failure modes and makes it a challenge to predict how they fail. The lecture will present the speaker’s recent research with his colleagues on nonlocal approaches for modeling architected materials and structures and fracture in brittle solids. First, a mesoscale microcrack frame model for lattice-based architected structures directly based on moment-curvature and stress-strain relationships of the individual frame elements. Is presented. In the second topic, a thermodynamically consistent fracture model for brittle and quasi-brittle solids based on Graph-based Finite Element Analysis (GraFEA) is discussed. These studies formulated a graph-based approach in two-dimensional and three-dimensional models, implementing it in Abaqus/Explicit using a vectorized user material subroutine (VUMAT). The computational technique also incorporates a probabilistic approach to damage growth by using a measure of “microcrack survival probability” and its evolution. The approach will be demonstrated using several examples.

Bio: Brian Uy is Scientia Professor of Structural Engineering in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of New South Wales. Brian has delivered over 100 plenary/keynote/invited lectures and has been involved in research in steel and composite structures for over 30 years. He has co-authored over 700 publications including over 300 refereed journal articles. Brian is Chairman of the Standards Australia Committee BD-032 on Composite Building Structures and BD-090-06 on Steel and Composite Bridge Structures. He is currently President-Elect and Vice President of the Institution of Structural Engineers (IStructE) and Vice President of the International Association of Bridge and Structural Engineering (IABSE). Brian is an elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, Engineers Australia, Institution of Structural Engineers, Institution of Civil Engineers, American Society of Civil Engineers, Structural Engineering Institute and the International Association of Bridge and Structural Engineers.

Abstract: To be updated.

Bio: 

Abstract: