DATE:

Friday, April 19, 2019

TIME:

3:30 PM

LOCATION:

GMCS-314

SPEAKER:

Mo Li, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of California-Irvine.

ABSTRACT:

Today’s needs to improve concrete infrastructure service life and resilience are challenged
by the intrinsic quasi-brittleness of concrete materials, and the difficulty with spatial
damage sensing to inform timely maintenance and prevent structural failure. Concrete is
susceptible to cracking and deterioration under service conditions and damage under extreme
hazard events. Current management practices of concrete infrastructure rely on visual
inspections that can be subjective and are limited to accessible locations. Structural
health monitoring approaches mainly depend on point-based sensors that provide local
measurements and cannot spatially locate or quantify damage such as cracking and corrosion.
To tackle these challenges, this work focuses on a new direct, spatial sensing approach
based on novel multifunctional cementitious materials. Multifunctional cementitious materials
are encoded with a distributed microcracking damage process coupled with damage self-sensing
capacity. The sequential formation of steady-state microcracks during material strain-hardening
stage leads to a prolonged damage process and high damage tolerance, while allowing detection
of damage level long before failure occurs. The tailored electromechanical behavior of the
material enables strain and damage self-sensing functionalities during elastic and post-cracking
stages. Through advances in novel tomography methods, spatial mapping offering a visual depiction
and quantification of damage in concrete members is achieved by electrical probing only from the
boundaries. This talk highlights the research on these developments at the interface of science and engineering.

Bio: Dr. Mo Li is an Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the
University of California, Irvine. She received her M.S. in Civil Engineering, M.S. in
Industrial and Operations Engineering, and Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from the University
of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She did her undergraduate studies at Tongji University in China.
Her research focuses on nonconventional infrastructure materials, and their interfaces
with structural engineering, sensing, and advanced manufacturing methods. Examples are
infrastructure materials with intrinsic and repeatable self-healing capacity, bio-inspired
self-sensing and visualization of spatial damage in concrete structures, damage-tolerant
geopolymers, and 3D printing concrete for highly loaded structures. She is the recipient
of the Samueli Faculty Career Development Professorship, the Innovation in Teaching Award,
and is the Director of the Advanced and Multifunctional Infrastructure Materials and
Manufacturing Research Laboratory (AM3-Lab) at UCI. She has served as a principle investigator
for a number of federal-, state- and industry-funded projects.

HOST:

Satchi Venkataraman, Aerospace Engineering

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