UVM Civil and Environmental Engineering

03/28/2023

05/16/2020

05/02/2020

Someone made this really cool sidewalk chalk drawing to celebrate our Civil & Environmental Engineering graduates...right in front of Discovery Hall...How wonderful! Please share it.

04/24/2020

Check out our Graduate Program informational video - Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Vermont. Very exciting work going on...Come and join us!

10/24/2018

CEE Grad Seminar - This Friday October 26, 2018; Perkins 102
In this week’s seminar, Dr. Jun Li assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth will give a presentation entitled Enhancing Fracture Performance of 3D Printed Layered Materials.
Abstract:
Additive manufacturing (or 3D printing) is being increasingly used in a wide range of areas including civil, mechanical, aerospace and biomedical engineering where it offers significant advantages for model prototyping. However, the reduced fracture performance typically observed in 3D printed layered materials limits its application to end-user load-bearing components. A combination of computational and experimental investigation is performed to study 3D printed materials with various build orientations for enhanced fracture properties, including single edge notched tension (SENT) and bending (SENB) specimens made of acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene (ABS) polymers by fused filament fabrication. The measured fracture properties were found to highly depend on layer/filament orientations and crack kinking was observed to often follow the weak planes along those directions. The extended finite element method (XFEM) using cohesive zone approach with anisotropic damage initiation and evolution criteria has been developed to capture the results measured in experiments. Numerical parametric studies further show that the inter-layer and inter-filament bonding strength could be tuned to create alternate crack paths for maximum fracture energy. Finally, toughening mechanisms using topological patterns on sample surface that are readily to be delivered in 3D printing so as to deflect crack paths are demonstrated in experiments. This study sheds light on optimization of 3D printed as well as other layered materials for enhanced fracture performance.
Biography:
Dr. Jun Li has been an assistant professor of the Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth since 2016. He obtained his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2012, where he also earned M.S. degrees in Mathematics and in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics. After that, he worked as a postdoctoral scholar in Aerospace at California Institute of Technology and then as a quality assurance manager at Dassault Systemes Simulia Corp before joining UMass. His research interest is to develop theoretical and computational methods combined with experiments for the assessment, design, optimization and manufacturing of novel materials and structures in various applications.

10/03/2018

CEE Grad Seminar - This Friday October 7, 2018; Perkins 102
This Friday, Dr. Clelia Marti will be presenting on her investigations into seawater desalination on coastal environments. Below you can find a short bio and presentation abstract -
Bio: Dr. Clelia Marti is a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and will be working on the Vermont EPSCoR project “Basin Resilience to Extreme Events in the Lake Champlain Basin (BREE)”. Her main research is focused on improving the understanding of transport and mixing processes in surface water systems (i.e., rivers, lakes, reservoirs, wetlands, estuaries and coastal seas) and the interplay between these processes and the biogeochemistry of the environment using high level field data analysis, numerical modelling and mathematical scaling.
Title: Investigations into the impact of seawater desalination on coastal environments: the Perth Seawater Desalination Plant

Abstract: Commissioned in November 2006, the Perth Seawater Desalination Plant located on the eastern shore of Cockburn Sound, a coastal embayment 40 km south of Perth (Western Australia), was the first plant to supply desalinated water to an Australian city. The plant is designed to produce 45 billion litres of water per year (125 million litres per day), approximately 17% of the Perth water needs. Environmental concerns associated with the plant were two-fold, the first being the large amount of power required by the reverse osmosis process to produce desalinated seawater, and the second being the saline discharge from the plant into Cockburn Sound which could potentially increase stratification and therefore result in low oxygen conditions. This presentation outlines detailed studies into the second issue, that is the dynamics of the saline discharge and its potential impact on oxygen levels in Cockburn Sound.

03/22/2018

CEE Grad Seminar - This Friday March 23 Perkins 101

This week during grad seminar, Professor Shakuntala Rao of the State University of New York, Plattsburgh will be presenting. Her presentation is titled, "Mystery of the missing engineers: Portrayal of engineers and engineering in the news media." Please find a brief bio of Professor Rao below.
Bio:

Shakuntala Rao is professor at the department of Communication Studies at State University of New York, Plattsburgh, New York. Her research and teaching interests are in the areas of journalism practice, popular culture and ethics. She has edited four anthologies on journalism and media studies and numerous research articles. She is recipient of the State University of New York chancellor's award for excellence in scholarship. She has been a senior fulbright scholar to India, a Brookings Institute senior fellow at Tshingua University in Beijing, and a fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study at Stellenbosch University, South Africa.

02/07/2018

CEE Grad Seminar - This Friday February 9; Perkins 101

This week Jeff DeGraff, P.E. of Hoyle, Tanner, and Associates will be presenting on Hydraulic Modeling.

Bio: Mr. Jeff DeGraff currently works as a Structural/Hydraulic Engineer for Hoyle, Tanner, and Associates. He graduated from Clarkson University in 2011 with a Masters of Science in Water Resources Engineering.

Abstract
Mr. Jeff DeGraff's presentation is titled "Hydraulic Engineering and Modeling, The Path from 1D to 2D" which will address conceptual differences/assumptions between 1D and 2D open channel equations and model setup, model comparisons, and 2D model verification.

02/06/2018

PhD candidate Chandler Smith work on "Detection of spatially sparse damage using impulse response sensitivity and LASSO regularization" has been published by the Journal of Inverse Problems in Science and Engineering. To check out the article click on the following link:

http://www.tandfonline.com/…/…/10.1080/17415977.2018.1434776

02/01/2018

SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT:
There will be a special seminar on Tuesday, February 13th at 3:00pm in Votey 105 presented by Jo Daniel of UNH CEE. Dr. Daniel has been recognized as a regional and even national leader for her work with ICNET at UNH - The Infrastructure and Climate Network. VTrans and other Vermont organizations work with the UNH-based collaborative (so do Arne and Jim at the TRC).

Message from Dr. Aultman-Hall: Even though it is not Friday, I hope the CEE faculty and graduate students will attend her seminar in Votey 105 at 3PM on Feb 13 (see attached). I am sure we will give the students a Friday off later in the semester to make up for this :) Dr. Daniel has agreed to follow our new shorter seminar format and looks forward to MANY questions from students.

02/01/2018

CEE Grad Seminar - This Friday February 2; Perkins 101
This week Professor Ehsan Ghazanfari will be presenting on geothermal energy as a renewable energy source.
Abstract:
Geothermal energy contributes to the renewable energy revolution. Deep geothermal research continues towards commercialization, while shallow geothermal energy is continuously improved for higher efficiency and tailored applications. The talk will provide an overview of existing challenges and recent advancements in both shallow and deep geothermal energy development.

Bio:
Ehsan is an Assistant Professor in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department. He received his PhD degree in Civil Engineering (geotechnical eng. focus) from Lehigh University in 2013.