Civil engineering

Bolts along Bay Bridge bike path fail

05/29/13 San Francisco Chronicle — Civil engineering professor Bob Bea comments on yet another problem with bolts on the new span of the San Francisco Bay Bridge, currently under construction: "This is not pretty. … If we are being challenged by straightforward, simple things, it raises serious questions about what we've done on complex situations."

Plate piles keep levees intact

05/13/13 — In the basement of Davis Hall, Hamed Hamedifar (Ph.D'12 CEE) is rattling scale models of levees on a shake table, subjecting them to vibrations replicating the magnitude 6.9 El Centro earthquake of 1940. Hamedifar is designing a plate pile system, rectangular plates affixed to three-yard beams, to bolster the strength of levees in places like the California Delta.

To a fault

05/01/13 — Civil engineers have found that determining how long a fault has healed between seismic events help them predict the type of shaking that will occur when it ruptures again.

Experiential ed.

05/01/13 — Many hands-on labs, shops and workspaces around campus allow students to learn by doing.

Connected Corridors aims to boost efficiency of existing roads

03/18/13 Berkeley Research — Connected Corridors, a project led by engineering professors Alex Bayen and Roberto Horowitz, is developing technologies to help Caltrans gather and analyze traffic data. A goal of the research: to make existing roadways more efficient, rather than launching new highway-construction projects.

Bob Bea, the master of disaster

02/25/13 Men's Journal — Civil engineering professor Bob Bea, who leads off testimony this week in the trial of BP and other companies involved in the 2010 Deepwater Horizon blowout, is profiled for his work as "the nation's foremost forensic engineer ... the guy to call when levees break or oil rigs explode – to sift through the wreckage, assign blame, and try to prevent the same mistakes again."

Study gives glimpse of crowd-sourced commuting future

12/10/12 New Cities Foundation — Sharing real-time information about traffic or other transportation delays provides drivers and riders greater control over their commute, and it could help local authorities improve transportation planning, says a new study conducted by CITRIS researchers in partnership with San Jose and Ericsson.

Bullet-train planners face huge engineering challenge

11/12/12 Los Angeles Times — An audacious plan is taking shape on the drawing boards of California's bullet train planners as they envision a high-speed rail line from Bakersfield to L.A. that will travel over two mountain ranges and more than half a dozen earthquake faults. The crossing is seizing the imagination of engineers who see it as the greatest design challenge of the $68-billion project. "It is the project of the century," said Berkeley civil engineering professor Bill Ibbs.

Quake model aids in fault studies

11/05/12 — A new civil engineering study reveals that the more time an earthquake fault has to heal, the faster the shake it will produce when it finally ruptures. Because the rapidity and strength of the shaking are what causes damage to major structures, the new findings could help engineers better assess the vulnerabilities of buildings, bridges and roads.

Chart showing info collected by Quantified Traveler app

Rerouting behavior

11/01/12 — Associate professors of civil and environmental engineering Raja Sengupta and Joan Walker created the Quantified Traveler app to quantify what influences travel behavior and to encourage more sustainable travel.

Fabricating the ApoCALypse

11/01/12 — CEE Steel Bridge team competed against 600 students from 47 engineering schools in May 2012 to win the national title.

A new loo

11/01/12 — In response to a challenge posed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to develop toilets that are clean, affordable and sustainable for the 2.5 billion people who lack access to modern latrines, engineering professor Kara Nelson and postdoctoral student Temitope Ogunyoku designed a new loo.

$2.5 million grant to improve traffic safety

08/24/12 ITS — California's Office of Traffic Safety (OTS) has awarded nearly $2.5 million in grants to two research and education centers affiliated with the Institute of Transportation Studies to improve safety for pedestrians, bicyclists, motorcyclists, and drivers. The Safe Transportation Research & Education Center (SafeTREC) and the Technology Transfer Program (Tech Transfer) will use the funds to study better ways to prevent crashes and to help local agencies identify potentially hazardous surface roadway conditions.

White House report provides roadmap for revitalizing U.S. manufacturing

07/17/12 — The President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) released a report on July 17 that provides a roadmap for revitalizing manufacturing industries in the U.S. The report is a product of the Advanced Manufacturing Partnership (AMP) Steering Committee, whose membership includes leading manufacturing experts from industry and six universities, including the University of California, Berkeley.“For the U.S economy to flourish, America must have a robust manufacturing sector,” said UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert J. Birgeneau. “This report maps out exciting and innovative strategies by each of the university, government and business sectors that can ensure that the U.S. will play a leadership role in advancing manufacturing. We at UC Berkeley are excited by this report and are ready to play an active role in moving forward the report's recommendations.”

The year of the ApoCALypse: Steel Bridge Team wins nationals

06/26/12 — Berkeley's Steel Bridge Team, based in the civil and environmental engineering department, won the 2012 national steel bridge title on May 25 and 26. Roughly 600 students from 47 engineering schools from across the country gathered to compete and test their steel structure design, fabrication and construction skills during this year's competition at Clemson University.

UC Berkeley Steel Bridge Team takes first place at Nationals

05/31/12 — The CEE Steel Bridge team and their entry, ApoCALypse, took first overall at the 2012 ASCE/AISC Student Steel Bridge Competition held at Clemson University, South Carolina over the Memorial Day weekend. "We held our breath when they announced third place (Cal Poly), and when MIT got second, we started cheering like crazy--for them--and for us, because we knew we were first," said Sabrina Odah, bridge project manager.

Diagram of how Berkeley0Darfur stove improves lives

It starts with a stove

05/01/12 — The Berkeley-Darfur Stoves project addresses the needs of families displaced by violence in western Sudan.

New tenants at Richmond Field Station

05/01/12 — In January 2012, the Berkeley Lab named the Richmond Field Station as its top choice for a second campus; pending regulatory reviews, LBNL aims to open new research space by 2016.

Slow going

05/01/12 — In California, single drivers of hybrid vehicles could drive in carpool lanes until 2011, but after the state put the brakes on the program, transportation engineer Michael Cassidy and graduate student Kitae Jang found that hybrids in standard lanes slowed traffic on Bay Area freeways.

Rowing on to nationals

04/17/12 — Student engineers from more than a dozen western universities gathered in late March for a weekend of ambitious civil and environmental engineering competitions. Berkeley was the host campus for this year's Mid-Pacific Regional Conference, put on by the American Society of Civil Engineers. At Quarry Lakes in Fremont, concrete canoe teams raced in heats. Berkeley's team, aboard their new canoe GraffiCal 2.0, came in second place. Along with first-place winner University of Nevada, Reno, Berkeley advances to the 25th annual National Concrete Canoe Competition in Reno in mid-June.