Luna Lu, ACPA Professor and Founding Director of the Center for Intelligent Infrastructure at Purdue University's Lyles School of Civil Engineering, and her PhD student Zhihao Kong, have received the 2022 Alfred Noble Prize awarded by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) for their paper, "Improved Method to Determine Young’s Modulus for Concrete Cylinder Using Electromechanical Spectrum: Principle and Validation”, published in Journal of Aerospace Engineering, November 2020.

Established in 1929, this award consists of a fund contributed by engineers and others in honor of Mr. Alfred Noble, Past President of ASCE and WSE, for the purpose of perpetuating his name and achievements. The recipient of this inter-society award is selected by a committee with representation from ASCE, ASME, IEEE, AIMMP, and WSE. The award is given for a technical paper of exceptional merit published in any of these society’s technical publications. The paper must be written by two authors only, and the first author should be younger than 35 years at the time of publication.

The paper was nominated for its scientific merits, engineering innovation and impact to the civil engineering community. The paper has provided fundamental physics, mathematic modeling and experimental validation of a new testing methodology to determine the Young’s modulus of concrete. It enables a novel testing method for automated, and real-time measurement of concrete’s strength using IoT sensors, which has been further developed by the two authors. The technology was also named as one of the 2021 Infrastructure Gamechangers in the 2021 ASCE Report Card for America's Infrastructure.

The technical excellence of this research work, and its impact on the profession have been aptly recognized by the Alfred Noble Prize in Civil Engineering, which is named after one of the most prominent civil engineers. Please follow this link to read more about Mr. Alfred Noble, an engineering legend, and his tremendous contributions to the profession.