Michel Ghosn

Professor of Civil Engineering
The City College of the City University of New York / CUNY
New York, NY

Design and Safety Assessment of Structures and Infrastructure Systems Subjected to Extreme Events in a Changing Climate

Lecture will be live streamed, MUST register here for live stream link

Tuesday, October 29, 2024 - 4:30 pm EDT

Dr. Michel Ghosn’s expertise is in the risk assessment and the reliability analysis of civil structure and infrastructure systems. He has worked on the development of criteria and Load and Resistance Factor Design (LRFD) procedures for quantifying bridge redundancy which formed the basis for the system factors recommended in the current American Association of Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) Manual for Bridge Evaluation (MBE). He has also worked on developing models for the design of bridges for extreme events including seismic, wind, ship collisions and scour and their combinations. His work on the development of live load models for highway bridges led to the implementation of the current permit load factors in the AASHTO MBE. These models have also been widely applied in bridge engineering practice and adopted by researchers and practicing engineers world-wide. Professor Ghosn is currently serving on several American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) committees working on developing procedures for accounting for the effects of climate change during the design and safety assessment of buildings and other structures. Prof. Ghosn’s overall accomplishments have been recognized through several awards from national and international engineering research and professional associations.

Design and Safety Assessment of Structures and Infrastructure Systems Subjected to Extreme Events in a Changing Climate.  Civil infrastructure systems are exposed to various types of human-made, environmental, and climatic hazards within their service lives. Reliability-based approaches and probabilistic risk-informed methods have long been used for assessing the safety of such systems and developing design standards and specifications to account for the random nature of these hazards, their intensities, rates of occurrence, and possible compounding effects.  Specifically, current design standards provide reliability-calibrated design load maps and tables as well as load combination factors for use in engineering practice during a structure’s safety assessment process.  These maps and associated procedures are based on historical data assuming that the underlying climatic processes are unchanging over time such that observed variations in the historical data are only random oscillations around underlying stationary statistical properties.  However, ageing processes, growth in economic activities, and climate change are causing increases in the frequencies and intensities of human-made and environmental hazards, raising the risk to infrastructure systems and their users. This presentation will review the fundamental principles behind structural code developments and their underlying assumptions. It also examines analytical methods to assess the safety of structural systems accounting for the nonstationary nature of climatic hazards. The presentation will present approaches for adjusting current structural design specifications in view of anticipated climate change scenarios.  Numerical examples will illustrate the application of these approaches for the safety assessment and the design of structural systems.