CE News & Spotlights

A recently-established College of Engineering center has made three seed grant awards in the first year of its seed grant competition. Researchers with the Center for Resilient Infrastructures, Systems, and Processes (CRISP) develop solutions to questions such as: What causes some systems - computing, cyber physical, or large-scale engineered systems - to be resilient to disruptions of various kinds? And what causes some systems to “bounce back” from a failure quickly? The projects chosen for seed funding will address different aspects of these broad questions.

Congratulations to Professor Jon Fricker as the recipient of the 2018 D. Grant Mickle Award from the Transportation Research Board. The award was given for his paper titled, "Bundling Bridge and Other Highway Projects: Patterns and Policies."

Civil Engineering grad student Ting-Wei Wang has been named one of five students to receive the 2018-2019 Daniel P. Jenny Research Fellowship from the Precast/Prestressed Concrete Institute. The program connects professors and students with industry experts to advance research in precast concrete. In addition, Ting-Wei was also selected as the recipient of the Alan Mattock Graduate Scholarship. This scholarship is awarded to only one of the five students who received the PCI Fellowship.

Purdue University researchers have developed a method to detoxify water with chlorine and ultraviolet radiation, which may provide new hope for water-stressed areas and help promote the reuse of wastewater. The Purdue team developed a method for selectively degrading and detoxifying amines, organic compounds derived from ammonia that are common in water supplies. Amines include a number of compounds that can be toxic to humans and other animals.

Mohammad Jahanshahi, Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering, was awarded the 2017 Kobori Prize recognizing the best paper published in Structural Control and Health Monitoring (SCHM).

A Purdue University-developed product called Blueavion f1, launched Monday (July 23) by Bluemac Analytics Inc. is shown to help airports more accurately log airport operations. The technology, developed by Darcy Bullock, the Lyles Family Professor of Civil Engineering and director of the Joint Transportation Research Program, and John Mott, associate professor in the Purdue Polytechnic Institute School of Aviation and Transportation Technology, features a transponder data collection system that provides a more accurate method to determine the number of operations an airport has in a given time.

John Mott was awarded the Fall 2017 Civil Engineering Best Dissertation Award and will be recognized this fall at the Civil Engineering Scholarship and Awards Banquet.

Purdue University’s Discovery Park will lead a nationwide partnership focusing on the expanding research field of connected and autonomous vehicles. Darcy Bullock, the Lyles Family Professor of Civil Engineering and director of the Joint Transportation Research Program, will lead the partnership through Discovery Park, Purdue University’s complex for major interdisciplinary research activities.

Professor Venkatesh Merwade received the 2018 Indiana Water Resources Association (IWRA) Outstanding Achievement Award in academic sector at its annual symposium in Bloomington, Indiana on June 27, 2018. The IWRA award recognizes individuals who have made significant contribution to the Indiana Water Resources Community through research and technical advances, information dissemination and education.

Srinath Shiv Kumar, a doctoral student in the Lyles School of Civil Engineering, was awarded the first place in the North American Society of Trenchless Technology's No-Dig Show student poster competition for his research titled 'Leveraging Big-Data and Deep Learning for the Condition Assessment of Wastewater Pipelines.'

Super-resilient materials found in the animal kingdom owe their strength and toughness to a design strategy that causes cracks to follow the twisting pattern of fibers, preventing catastrophic failure. Researchers in a recent series of papers have documented this behavior in precise detail and also are creating new composite materials modeled after the phenomenon. The work was performed by a team of researchers at Purdue University in collaboration with University of California, Riverside.

PhD student Tho Le is spending this summer collaborating with faculty at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands on a project matching and routing strategies for emerging crowd-shipping systems.

Tariq U. Saeed, Hugh W. and Edna M. Donnan Doctoral Candidate of Transportation & Infrastructure Systems Engineering at Purdue University's Lyles School of Civil Engineering, is the 2018 winner of the Jack E. Leisch Fellowship Award. With a strong showing as runner-up for this year's fellowship is CE doctoral student Seyed Ali Ghahari.

Dr. Anahita Modiriasari received the 2018 Dr. Neville G.W. Cook Ph.D. Dissertation Award for the best Ph.D. thesis in rock mechanics and rock engineering. The award is given by ARMA, the American Rock Mechanics Association. A plaque, with the award, was presented to Dr. Modiriasari at the awards banquet during the 52nd U.S. Rock Mechanics/Geomechanics Conference in Seattle.

Adam McAlpine (BSCE '00) has been named engineering director for the city of Valparaiso, Indiana. He formerly served as Valparaiso's chief deputy engineer, joining the city in 2010.

Cheryl Cunningham (BSCE '80) was recognized by the American Council of Engineering Companies of Indiana for her significant contributions to the practice of engineering. Cheryl recently founded and serves as president for “I Can Be An Engineer,” a 501(c)3 not for profit founded to inspire young minds to learn about engineering.

The 58th Annual CE Open was held on Friday, June 8, 2018 at Coyote Crossing Golf Club in West Lafayette, where we saw more than 70 golfers hit the links. Many thanks to our sponsors, and to everyone who joined us. We hope to see even more of you at next year's event!

Matt Lovell (MSCE '08, PhD '10), associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rose-Hulman University, has received the American Concrete Institute’s Walter P. Moore Jr. Faculty Achievement Award. The honor recognizes professors with demonstrated technical competence, high character and integrity who have less than seven years of faculty service in teaching concrete design, materials or construction.

An in-depth review of environmental protections for a common storm water culvert repair practice — cured-in-place pipe repair, or CIPP — has revealed differing installation practices across states, water contamination incidents in 10 states and Canada, and lack of safety data for existing installation practices.