Billie F. Spencer, Jr.

Nathan M. & Anne M. Newmark Endowed Chair in Civil Engineering,
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering,
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,
Urbana, IL

Performance of Dynamically Excited Structures through Optimization
and Monitoring
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Friday, November 18, 2022 - 4:30 pm

Location: Whitaker Lab 303, Lehigh University,5 E. Packer Avenue, Bethlehem, PA

Billie F. Spencer, Jr. received his Ph.D. in theoretical and applied mechanics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1985. He worked on the faculty at the University of Notre Dame for 17 years before returning to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he currently holds the Nathan M. and Anne M. Newmark Endowed Chair in Civil Engineering and is the former Director of the Newmark Structural Engineering Laboratory. His research has been primarily in the areas of structural health monitoring, structural control, cyberinfrastructure applications, stochastic fatigue, stochastic computational mechanics, and natural hazard mitigation. He has directed more than $60M in funded research and published more than 700 technical papers/reports, including two books. He was the first to study and design magnetorheological (MR) fluid dampers for protection of structures against earthquakes and strong winds. He led NSF's George E. Brown Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) system integration project. Dr. Spencer has received numerous awards, including the ASCE Norman Medal, the ASCE Housner Structural Control and Monitoring Medal, and the ASCE Newmark Medal among others. He is a Fellow of ASCE, a Foreign Member of the Polish Academy of Sciences, a Foreign Member of the Engineering Academy of Japan, and a Foreign Member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering.

Performance of Dynamically Excited Structures through Optimization and Monitoring. This lecture provides an overview of two efforts directed toward assessing and improving the performance of structures conducted by researchers in the Smart Structures Technology Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The first focuses on topology optimization of structures subjected to random dynamic loads. A general topology optimization framework is presented to accommodate directly the random dynamic nature of the excitation and the responses. The proposed framework is illustrated for seismically excited and wind excited buildings, as well as bridges subjected to random traffic loading. The second part of the lecture discusses recent advances in computer vision techniques as they apply to the problem of civil infrastructure inspection and monitoring. Inspection applications presented include identifying context such as structural components, characterizing local and global visible damage, and detecting changes from a reference image, with focus on rapid structural condition assessment of buildings and bridges after disasters. Monitoring applications discussed include static measurement of strain and displacement, as well as dynamic measurements of displacement and modal analysis. This research will ultimately lead to more effective performance of our civil infrastructure.