The research under the Career program involves the development of new courses in civil engineering materials as well as research on the use of highly ductile fiber-reinforced cement-based composites in precast, post-tensioned bridge piers for seismic regions. To date one new undergraduate course in civil engineering materials (Physical and Computational Simulation of Materials) has been developed and given by the PI in the spring of 2001 and 2002. This course has a structured laboratory component that couples physical experiments with computer modeling of materials. Two graduate students have been conducting research under this grant. Small-scale precast concrete bridge columns with localized use of highly ductile fiber-reinforced concrete have been fabricated and tested. Pilot creep and shrinkage as well as permeability tests have been conducted on the ductile concrete to estimate potential prestress losses in the bridge piers. A post-doctoral candidate was partially supported from this grant and has developed a constitutive model for cyclic and seismic nonlinear finite element analysis of the ductile material. On-going research includes: half-scale pier tests; numerical analyses of full bridges using the highly ductile cement-based composites; and risk and economic analyses of using this new material in practice. Three research presentations have been made including one at the NSF 5th National Workshop on Bridge Research in Progress. A conference paper based on this work has been accepted for the 7th U.S. National Conference on Earthquake Engineering, July 2002. Three journal papers are in preparation to be submitted for review in February and March 2002; one on constitutive model development for cyclic loading, one on the pilot bridge pier experiments and one on the preliminary time-dependent material response results.

This MCEER research related to advanced materials explores the applicability of a high-performance, highly ductile cement-based composite as an energy-dissipating infill panel system for steel structures. Assessment of the material is being made with a combination of experimental and numerical studies to verify both structural performance and constructability. Panel tests are being conducted under quasi-static lateral load. Shake table tests are planned for the future. Numerical studies using properties gained from material characterization, joint connection experiments and laterally loaded panel experiments are being used to analyze and evaluate the performance of this retrofit strategy in a demonstration hospital project. These numerical studies also will be used to investigate the optimal use of various panel configurations (using optimization methods developed by other MCEER researchers) and their effectiveness as a portable system within the demonstration project. The combination of experimental and numerical work, including the optimization studies will be used for cost-benefit analyses by other MCEER researchers. To date, four conference and workshop presentations on this work have been given nationally and internationally. Two conference papers have been written and currently one journal paper is in preparation based on this work