Infrastructure

Study reveals resilience of Roman architectural concrete

12/15/14 — An international research team studying the mortar used to build ancient Roman architectural marvels, led by Marie Jackson of civil and environmental engineering, has found a secret to the material's resilience - formation during curing of a crystalline binding hydrate that prevents microcracks from propagating

Freedom phones

11/01/14 — EECS Ph.D. student Yahel Ben-David and alum Barath Raghavan lead the De Novo Group, a research team developing the Rangzen smartphone app, designed to support dissenters and protect identities.

Bullet train just a blur in California governor’s race

10/28/14 Los Angeles Times — Civil engineering professor Robert Bea, a pioneering expert in the field of risk analysis, comments on the relatively small role California's bullet train is playing in the state's gubernatorial election, and how that could become a problem down the line.

More Bay Bridge woes may validate concerns of span’s #1 critic

10/10/14 California magazine — Civil engineering professor Abolhassan Astaneh-Asl, one of the earliest and most vocal critics of the new Bay Bridge design, has been portrayed as a Cassandra, but these days he merely seems prescient.

What could collapse the Golden Gate Bridge?

09/19/14 KALW — At the movies, the Golden Gate Bridge has been leveled by earthquakes, apes, even a mega-shark. But how would the iconic span fare in more realistic disaster scenarios? Civil engineering professor Abolhassan Astaneh-Asl helps KALW radio figure it out.

Scholars on scooters

08/14/14 — Students zip around campus on electric scooters while learning about energy, transportation and vehicle-to-grid systems in a new civil engineering class.

Water 4.0

05/02/14 — An excerpt from civil and environmental engineering professor David Sedlak's new book, Water 4.0: The Past, Present and Future of the World's Most Vital Resource, which calls for major changes in urban water systems.

Q+A on L.A. seismic study

05/01/14 — Jack Moehle, professor of civil engineering, talked to Berkeley Engineer about his recently completed seismic study of unreinforced concrete buildings in Los Angeles, and its impact.

More woes for high-speed rail

03/31/14 San Francisco Business Times — The $68 billion cost estimate for a Los Angeles-to-San Francisco high-speed rail network is far too low, and the system may be eclipsed by emerging technologies before the 30-year project is completed, civil engineering professor C. William Ibbs warned the state Senate transportation committee last week.

Reducing the risk of earthquake collapse in California cities

03/04/14 Contra Costa Times — In a guest commentary, four California professors, including Berkeley Engineering's Jack Moehle, write about their joint research into the seismic risks posed by older concrete buildings, and the methods and costs of mitigating that risk.

Building a super bowl

11/01/13 — An insider's look into the construction of the new Levi's Stadium, the NFL's first LEED Gold stadium and among the fastest ever constructed.

Bike path flaws add millions to Bay Bridge bill

09/12/13 San Francisco Chronicle — Robert Bea, CEE professor emeritus, says design and construction errors in the new Bay Bridge's bike and pedestrian path, which have already cost $3.8 million to remediate, are "symptomatic of a systemic problem ... I think it's becoming clear that the required level of scrutiny and checking has been deficient."

Oral history project recounts engineering marvels of the Bay Bridge

08/29/13 Bancroft Library — With the new Bay Bridge opening this holiday weekend, Berkeley Engineers Chuck Seim (CE '51) and Bob McDougald (CE '54) are two of more than a dozen people interviewed for the Bancroft Library's Bay Bridge Oral History Project. Seim has the rare distinction to have worked on all ten automobile bridges spanning the San Francisco Bay.

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."

Corrosion plagues new Bay Bridge span

05/20/13 Sacramento Bee — A comprehensive investigation by the Sacramento Bee of constructions problems on the new Bay Bridge quotes Berkeley materials science & engineering professor Thomas Devine as saying Caltrans used the wrong tests for corrosion, resulting in "essentially useless" findings. He called the agency's research "woefully inadequate" and "meaningless" for detecting "environmentally assisted cracking."

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.

Experts tackle questions about broken Bay Bridge anchor rods

04/16/13 Mercury News — Two Berkeley Engineering professors, metallurgical engineer Tom Devine and mechanical engineer Robert Ritchie, field questions about why 32 high-strength threaded steel anchor rods in the new eastern span of the Bay Bridge weakened and snapped.

Metallurgists say Bay Bridge bolt failure could have been prevented

04/10/13 Contra Costa Times — There are plenty of possible explanations for why 32 huge high-strength steel rods on the new Bay Bridge have snapped, says materials science professor Tom Devine, "but there are no excuses to have them behave in a brittle way."

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.

For good design, start with the end user

06/26/12 — “If you're an engineer and you're working on a project to improve parks, you could stay in a lab. Or you could go to up to Tilden Park and get a fuller context of what visitors experience,” says Lora Oehlberg, a mechanical engineering graduate student and an instructor in a sequence of classes known as the human-centered design course thread.