Alas, time flies by and now it’s almost the end of the summer. I heard many people complaining the long-lasting heat; the summer is definitely too short to me.
The main theme of the summer research was highway pavement design. More specifically, it was about local calibration of the mechanistic-empirical pavement design guide (MEPDG) developed by the AASHTO under several NCHRP projects. Two graduate students of mine and one high school students worked intensely in this project. Gulfam Jannat completed her MASc study in April and continued her research as a Research Associate for two months. Afzal Waseem transferred to MASc from MEng in May (officially in September). The high school kid is really a computer genius. He helped us solve several technical difficulties that had lingered for a long time. Based on the research, we submitted two papers to the 2013 Transportation Research Board (TRB) conference.
In June, I attended for the first time the annual conference of the Canadian Society of Civil Engineers (CSCE) held in Edmonto, Alberta. The University of Alberta hosted this year’s conference. I presented two papers, one related to the MEPDG local calibration and the other to pavement performance modeling. It looked that we have done the first comprehensive study on local calibration of MEPDG in Ontario.
Part of my research is on nuclear piping reliability and degradation modeling. In July, I attended the annual conference on Pressure Vessels and Piping (PVP) sponsored by American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). This year the conference was held in Toronto. I co-chaired one session for component reliability analysis. Our paper discussed a few hard and fundamental issues in degradation modeling by using feeder wall thinning due to flow-accelerate corrosion as an example. Our presentation attracted a large audience, if not the largest, among the technical sessions.
Due to some family reason, I gave up a chance of traveling to Japan for attending another conference on structural reliability in August.
Shuo Yu, a graduate student studying at the University of Waterloo under my co-supervision, has made significant progress in common cause failure modeling and failure rate estimation. Empirical Bayes method and the James-Stein method were the focus of his study.
Since August 1, Dr Zhao Zhao, a visiting scholar from China, started his one-year visiting research. Dr Zhao’s main current research focus is on technological risk assessment.